mike_hollander

<p>> Jasmine's photos in her blog</p>

<p>This is off-topic and late to this the thread, sorry. I was unaware of Ms. Star until today and wound up taking a look at her blog. It seemed to me that there's a large proportion of slightly off or worse compositions in her pictures. I was a little surprised to find this, considering how successful she apparently is. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of beautiful pictures on her site. The Fstoppers blog has just posted a long video interview with her where she says that she first picked up a digital SLR in 2007. I'm afraid that some of her pictures kinda look like it, too (I don't know how many of them were shot by a second shooter).<br>

http://fstoppers.com/chase-jarvis-sits-down-with-jasmine-star/</p>

<p>This is a very minor nitpick. In the #1 picture in the wedding gallery, the couple kissing on the pier in front of the boats is lit such that they are separated from the background a little too well to my eyes. They look like they might have been photoshopped into a picture of the pier and boats. Of course, the exposure and the use the flash are technically just fine, and possibly my eyes have been ruined by seeing too much photoshopping. However, the 'problem' seems to be very common these days with the strobist boom happening. Especially in compositions where the feet of the people are not shown touching the ground, it's very easy to end up with a picture where the models and the background look like they came from different shots, even if the models are lit well and look three-dimensional.</p>

<p>I gather you have seen the proofs since you've designed an album. Just out of curiosity: are you happy with the pictures? It seems to me that the photographer has some pretty serious issues if they can't manage to get one album printed. I could imagine a situation where the photography itself was botched and the photographer tried to hide this, but if the pictures are there, it seems to be pure madness to not print them after being contacted by a lawyer.</p>

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<p>Pop photo did a review on the D3000 this month and while they certainly didn't NOT like it, they seemed to lean toward the latest Canon Rebel instead.</p>

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<p>For what it's worth, Ken Rockwell also called D3000 Nikon's worst ever and said that the D40 is better for less money (and I know that he says a lot of things). This was back when D3000 was new and cost more. The "worst ever" should be qualified as being in reference to the Nikon line, which means that it's still a very good camera.</p>

<p>There's not much point in paying for a SB-900 unless you plan to use it with a modern Nikon DSLR also. You can get a manual Vivitar flash or such for the FM2 for a fraction of the price.</p>

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<p>I'm leaning towards the D3000 kit at this point. I wonder if it may have more resale value down the line since would be newer.</p>

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<p>The resale value of entry-level DSLR bodies is so bad anyway that it doesn't matter. I tried to look through the D3000 specifications out of curiosity, as I haven't tried one myself, and the somewhat significant differences over D60 seem to be an 11-point AF (instead of 3), a slightly larger LCD screen, and not much else. If the price of the two kits with the 55-200 lens is practically the same in your case, the newer AF is probably worth it.</p>

<p>The D60 kit seems to be a real bargain, and compared to that, the D40x body alone is not worth it. I guess the question with D5000 is that do you want to pay for video and live view? The 55-200mm VR DX is a also very good lens for the money. I suppose the choice there comes down to what you shoot.</p>

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<p>Hmm, would the D70, D70s or D1X be a better option for autofocus? They are in the same ballpark in terms of cost. Everything at the D70 level and above should have an autofocus motor if I'm correct.</p>

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<p>The models without the motor are D40(x), D60(s), D3000, D5000. Every other Nikon DSLR has one. I don't think it's that much of a problem, as the AF-S kit lenses and the 35 mm AF-S are excellent and inexpensive. There is a AF-S 50 mm, too, but it's faster and more expensive than the AF-I 1.8 one.</p>

<p>D1X is ancient at this point in time. I would not bother with it. D70 is getting old, too. If you can get a used D40x and a lens for substantially less than a new D5000 kit, it would be worth considering in my opinion.</p>

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<p>I am currently eyeing a used D40x though. The used DSLR and 50mm should cost the same as Panasonic's 20mm normal lens alone.</p>

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<p>That's an excellent idea, provided that it's in good working order, of course. It's a great camera, and you'd get experience with a DSLR at a minimal cost. Then you'd have a better idea about what more you want. The one gotcha is that the cheap Nikon 50 mm won't autofocus on D40x (you need AF-S lenses), but the kit 18-55 VR is inexpensive and optically excellent, and then there's the 35 mm AF-S, which will autofocus on D40x, D60, D5000 etc.</p>

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<p>Also it seems like it would be harder to get taken seriously say shooting a wedding if you go with a brand that isn't Canon or Nikon.</p>

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<p>I don't think this should be a problem. Pentax bodies are priced competitively compared to the similar Canikon ones, and the build quality should certainly be good enough. There are pro photographers using Pentax DSLRs. Of course, Pentax does not make anything in the D3 or 1DmkIV price range.</p>

<p>I'd say try to get as much of a test drive with each of Canon and Nikon as you can. I'm not too familiar with the latest Canons, but there used to be quite a difference in the ergonomics between the two. Both are well-designed and easy enough to use, but you may find that you have a preference for the handling of one over the other.</p>

<p>I agree that the meter in the Minolta should work well enough. You can probably get a used digital point-and-shoot for the price of a separate meter. Depending on what you are shooting, you might be able to use the point-and-shoot as a light meter that actually gives you a preview of the picture. The ISO values are not going to match film number-for-number and the P&S probably does not meter through the lens as the SLR does, so translating the exposure from the P&S to the film SLR requires some experimentation to get right. Of course, the fiddling with a P&S will probably kill the nice feeling of shooting a film camera.</p>

<p>I think that in the case of the pictures you linked, a lot of it is the black clothes that everyone is wearing. The pictures look post-processed to a pretty high contrast, which makes the clothes pitch black. The light faces jump at the viewer, because they are offset by the black shirts and tops. The family members all seem to have black hair and dark eyes, and the black clothes suit them reasonably well. A black shirt can be a very stark frame for the face of someone lighter-coloured.</p>

<p>+1 to what Matt wrote about the speedlights. In my previous post I assumed that flashes were strictly verboten.</p>

<p>A couple of years ago I was an audience member at a club gig that was played in near darkness. There were two pro (?) photographers firing on-camera flashes at full blast and the backdrop behind the tiny stage happened to be white. The flashes were enough to blind the audience and trigger migraine episodes. After a few songs the singer himself told the photographers to get lost.</p>

<p>Ken Rockwell's comparison of high-iso performance of D200 vs D300:<br>

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d300/moonlight/index.htm</p>

<p>Another comparison of D3, D90, D300 and D200 at ISO3200.<br>

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d90/iso-3200.htm</p>

<p>It seems that there are bigger differences in the noise reduction algorithms and other software than in the actual light sensitivity between D200 and D300. I suppose one would have to try to do your gig with a D200 and see how much worse the pictures actually look before being able to say much about it. The tricks that come to mind are a monopod and trying to carefully time the shots to the moments where the subject is still enough.</p>

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<p><em>fantastic colors and angles</em></p>

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<p>Some of it looked very much as if it was sponsored by the City of Stockholm's tourism office... No complaints, though, it is a very beautiful city in real life, too and very thoroughly covered by Google Streetview, in case anyone wants to take a look.</p>

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<p><em>title is a little misleading as the wedding photography aspect involves the first half hour</em></p>

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<p>Yes, as I said, photography is used as a simple plot device. The guy pretty much fires the shutter at random, and the pictures are barely shown.</p>

<p>I agree with Lex. There are several free software packages that read NEF, so the code is available and if everything else fails, you and fellow NEF file owners can hire a programmer to port the code to new systems in the future. Obviously, this is a very, very remote scenario. There are enough NEF files and programs that read them around that Nikon probably couldn't kill the technology if they tried. Once something is on the net, it pretty much does not go away. People still run binaries of games for 8-bit 1980s Atari computers under emulation on new computers.</p>

<p>I was a victim of automatic spell-checking. That was supposed to be 'loupe', not 'loop', sorry.</p>

<p><em>"(2) to attempt to convince a lab to scan them (not a good choice, because without permission it is copyright infringement)"</em></p>

<p>This is technically true, of course, but if the photographer handed over the negatives and the contract (I'm assuming that there was one) wasn't honoured anyway (job unfinished and no payment), I'd say the pictures are pretty much up for grabs. Was the photographer a professional and is he/she still in business?</p>

<p>A quick way to assess the negatives would be to look at them on a light box with a loop. Can you see more details in e.g. blown highlights than in the prints? If there is no there there in the negatives, then no amount of processing will help.</p>

<p>I'd probably try to get the negatives scanned at a high resolution and see whether the images are salvageable. The scanning itself is not a difficult procedure, but professional labs can still charge quite a bit for a job like this. If the images are workable, the post-processing work will probably be very time-consuming and require a fair bit of skill. Are you experienced with Photoshop or a similar tool?</p>

<p>This is somewhat off-topic. I saw the Swedish movie Bröllopsfotografen (The Wedding Photographer) and found it somewhat funny. The IMDB entry:</p>

<p>http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1359421/</p>

<p>It's a comedy and photography is used strictly as a plot device, none of it is technically realistic at all. I don't know how difficult it is to find this film on DVD in any given part of the world, but it you can't, the (*cough*) intertubes may be your friends. The film is in Swedish and as far as I know it hasn't been dubbed, so it's subtitles for other languages.</p>

<p>A quite good explanation of histograms and how the camera meter works:</p>

<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o7Q9qXXzhQ</p>

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<p>lens's</p>

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<p>lenses</p>

<p>I haven't done events like this and I don't have much to add, but I've been at the receiving end of these sorts of pictures a few times. I think that pictures of people speaking behind a lectern, especially ones taken with an on-camera flash are generally worse than useless, if you consider the distraction that the flash caused to the presentation. I'd rather look at a good posed portrait that actually shows the person. I'm sure that the fact that that person spoke at the event can be expressed in writing. Of course, if you're specifically hired to shoot everyone behind the lectern, then so be it.</p>

<p>I don't think it's a studio backdrop. The little boy is handling the straws of hay in one picture and the straws and vegetation seem to extend continuously from the foreground into the blurry background in the last picture. It would take some serious doing to stage that in a studio.</p>

<p>I'm guessing that simply the focal length is longer than one might guess. In the last photo, the whole family is in focus, but the perspective is pretty flat. I'd say the lens is simply long enough to throw the background out of focus.</p>

<p>It looks to me like the hazy daylight comes from behind the subjects and the photographer has then used reflectors or flashes to fill in, and done quite a bit of post-processing. Especially the third picture (the little boy with the hat) makes me think that the backlight is not a flash.</p>

<p>My guess, too, would be available light and quite a bit of dodging of faces in post-production. The picture of the couple sitting on a lawn with autumn leaves looks like it might have had some fill-in flash, but it's very subtle if that's the case.</p>

<p>I was mildly bothered that so many of the pictures were taken at a distance such that the couple was relatively small in the frame, and in the close-ups their faces were half-hidden by the position of their heads or lens flare, or shown upside-down (lying on the ground etc.). Half the time I was left looking for a portrait that would actually show what these people look like, but probably that's only because not all of the pictures are in the portfolio. Then I saw the side-by-side pair of pictures of the only gay couple and it made me laugh. Both pictures are taken from so far away that you only see two guys in suits somewhere in the frame. It's as if to keep a safe distance to the same-sex couple. No close-ups for them. It's probably a simple coincidence, but it looks pretty comical.</p>

<p>A long time ago, I used to practice lighting with a school photo club using a pair of 1000 W halogen work lights and DIY diffusers. They are dirt cheap and the light is actually pretty similar to the video lights, but you probably wouldn't want to drag one of those to a wedding. There's a bunch of problems with the work lights: they get very hot, you're lucky if you get a on/off switch (rather than just plugging in and unplugging), nevermind control of the intensity, they're heavy and clunky, and they need to be plugged into the electrical mains. They are probably good enough to practice lighting and colour balancing.</p>