September 2011: elf's Canon 50D Journal

From Friday Foto

I left the tree branches in the corner to give the image scale and depth. I also adjusted the levels slightly to deepen the shadows.

• The Photographer's Mind (a new book)
• How To Meter High Key Images
• Great White sharks swimming peacefully with people
• What if photographers only took meaningful photographs
• How to stand out from the crowd of photographers
• Timelapse photography (capturing 24 hours in a single photo; I captured an entire year using a similar technique)

From Friday Foto

Photographed on an overcast day, which I find to be the best lighting for close-up nature photography.

A preview of the new Canon S100.

Feature-wise, the interesting bits are the ability to zoom while recording video (it only took Canon 10 years to add this feature to the S series) and high-speed 240fps (QVGA resolution) and 140fps (VGA) photography. Also 5x zoom is an improvement over the usual 3x, but this is at a cost of f/5.9 at the long end.

We will have to wait for the sample photos before making a final verdict, but the DIGIC V chip is supposed to have improved noise-reduction. The pricing should be ~$499 hinting at a usable ISO of 400.

Sample images and video from the Nikon J1 and V1 system which was announced today. The high-speed videos are interesting. V1 ISO400 image looks good.

Update Thu 22 Sep 2011 05:39:52 PM EDT: DPreview posted sample images. The ISO 6400 images look pretty clean on the screen.

I await S100 sample images to compare.

From Friday Foto

I would have preferred the backgrounds to be less busy.

From Passing Fancy

I was originally waiting to photograph the 17:35 train pulling into Union when she walked by. This is actually a composite photo of two different photos from a sequence of 4 photographs. The bottom part of the belt and her skirt is from a different photo and I wanted to include it in the original. This was taken with the 50/1.4 panning across as I noticed her passing by.

From Pfoto 2011

The second is a close crop of the original photo.

The first tutorial is on lighting fashion portraits; the second is a video showing the amount of work that goes into architectural photography.