Hardware
Trying my Christmas present
04/Mai/09 03:17
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, I am talking about my christmas present, which I tried out last week for the first time (don’t even ask....). For Christmas I got a Lensbaby Muse. If you don’t know what a Lensbaby is, it is a special lens that you can use with an SLR camera that has a special optics in it, so that you can take photos in a way that only part of the photo are in sharp focus. An example would be a focussed middle section with everything blurred out towards the edges. The great thing with this lens is that you can have the sharp part anywhere in the frame that you want to have it, you just have to tilt the lens in that direction.
I first wanted to get a Lensbaby Composer, which is the newest version of the Lensbaby lenses and allows you to lock the lens once you have decided on a sweet spot and has a regular ring for shifting focus. But the problem was that the Composer is a lot more expensive (even though Lensbaby lenses are far less expensive than your regular DSLR lenses) and that no shop in Germany had them in stock and I needed to get it before I went back to the US the week after Christmas. So I went for the Muse, which is the classic version of their lens and a lot of fun to work with. The hardest parts are that you need to shift your sweet spot with your hands and by doing so you also focus the lens. As you can imagine, I am getting a lot of out of focus photos at the moment
The Lensbaby lenses are very much manual - its not just that you have to focus the lens, but you also have to use the lens in manual mode or Aperture Priority mode, since you have to set the Aperture into the lens with your hand. You get 5 or 6 different aperture rings with the lens and can buy additional ones that you can cut to your liking (for example using a star shape instead of a circle). Depending on the aperture you will get a different level of blurring from the sides.
In addition I also got the Macro kit for it, which is a fancy way of saying that I got two close-up filters They are specifically made for the lensbaby and get screwed onto the top of the lensbaby, like they would on a normal lens. With my obsession with flowers I had to have them 
Now, my first try with the lens... I decided to take the lens with me for a trip to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. It was very different and strange at first because I hadn’t tried the lens much before this but I soon got into it and found out how to take photos I liked. Even though I had a „What now?“ moment in there, as well: Somehow I thought I couldn’t find a focussed sweet spot with the lens, so I thought that the wheel for adjusting for your eyesight had been somehow gotten changed, which happens to me from time to time. So I started changing the wheel - until I thought about it and realized I did not have any Autofocus-able lens with me... What to do? I tied to take photos that I thought were sharp and then checked them at a zoom level on my display till I felt that the sharpness was okay in the photos. Took me a while....
Overall, I really, really liked my first experience with my new lensbaby and have, in fact, already gone out again for a second try with it - to the Georgia Aquarium. I think, I am getting addicted to it....
I first wanted to get a Lensbaby Composer, which is the newest version of the Lensbaby lenses and allows you to lock the lens once you have decided on a sweet spot and has a regular ring for shifting focus. But the problem was that the Composer is a lot more expensive (even though Lensbaby lenses are far less expensive than your regular DSLR lenses) and that no shop in Germany had them in stock and I needed to get it before I went back to the US the week after Christmas. So I went for the Muse, which is the classic version of their lens and a lot of fun to work with. The hardest parts are that you need to shift your sweet spot with your hands and by doing so you also focus the lens. As you can imagine, I am getting a lot of out of focus photos at the moment
The Lensbaby lenses are very much manual - its not just that you have to focus the lens, but you also have to use the lens in manual mode or Aperture Priority mode, since you have to set the Aperture into the lens with your hand. You get 5 or 6 different aperture rings with the lens and can buy additional ones that you can cut to your liking (for example using a star shape instead of a circle). Depending on the aperture you will get a different level of blurring from the sides.
In addition I also got the Macro kit for it, which is a fancy way of saying that I got two close-up filters
They are specifically made for the lensbaby and get screwed onto the top of the lensbaby, like they would on a normal lens. With my obsession with flowers I had to have them Now, my first try with the lens... I decided to take the lens with me for a trip to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. It was very different and strange at first because I hadn’t tried the lens much before this but I soon got into it and found out how to take photos I liked. Even though I had a „What now?“ moment in there, as well: Somehow I thought I couldn’t find a focussed sweet spot with the lens, so I thought that the wheel for adjusting for your eyesight had been somehow gotten changed, which happens to me from time to time. So I started changing the wheel - until I thought about it and realized I did not have any Autofocus-able lens with me... What to do? I tied to take photos that I thought were sharp and then checked them at a zoom level on my display till I felt that the sharpness was okay in the photos. Took me a while....
Overall, I really, really liked my first experience with my new lensbaby and have, in fact, already gone out again for a second try with it - to the Georgia Aquarium. I think, I am getting addicted to it....
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First observations: AMOD GPS tracker
02/Mai/09 04:32
In my last post I talked about the GPS tracker I bought recently. By now I have had the chance to take it out on three trips 
So I have definitely had time to test it.
The device takes three AAA batteries for tagging your location for 15 hours, so it is best to buy some rechargable batteries for it. After you put the batteries in, you just need to push the button to power it on and you are ready to go! So very easy. The only downside: the device takes several minutes to find your location initially, so if you want to tag all photos, be sure to turn it on a few minutes in advance.
The AMOD came with a little band so you can clip the tracker to your belt or to a bag. I clipped it onto a belt loop when i went out. It’s neither heavy nor big enough to get in the way, which is a plus.
Once you have turned it on, you can basically forget about it. It has three lights on the front to show you that it is turned on and working and also to let you know if the signal is not strong enough (which can happen inside) or the memory of the AMOD is full. It has 128MB memory, which does not sound like much but is enough for 72 hours of tracking data! You can increase that timeframe by letting it only record your location every 5 or 10 seconds instead of every second.
it gets a bit more complicated once you are back home from your photo trip: the AMOD comes with a software you can use to embed the GPS data into your images but I haven’t tried that software yet. What I have been doing is the following: I import my photos into Aperture like normal and then use Ovolab Geophoto to match the photos to the GPS track, which is pretty easy. The AMOD records the time on GMT, so you just need to tell it the time zone your camera uses and any time your photo is off from the „official“ time (mine is off by 29 seconds). Then I just need to hit a button to embed the longitude and latitude in the EXIF of my RAW file and simply update the EXIF in Aperture. And voilá, my photos have GPS locations
I only checked the locations on a few photos from my first try and they were off by a few meters but that could be due to the device not being calibrated (which also just takes the push of a button) or my reading the time difference from my camera wrong.
Overall, I really, really like the device and how relatively easy it is to embed the data. Of course, it adds some extra steps to my workflow but the way I have set it up currently, I could add the locations any time after importing, it is not the first thing I have to do and I can go back and add locations for edited versions of photos (e.g., HDRs or Panoramas). Definitely a great option till I get a camera and/or memory card with a GPS chip embedded.
So I have definitely had time to test it.The device takes three AAA batteries for tagging your location for 15 hours, so it is best to buy some rechargable batteries for it. After you put the batteries in, you just need to push the button to power it on and you are ready to go! So very easy. The only downside: the device takes several minutes to find your location initially, so if you want to tag all photos, be sure to turn it on a few minutes in advance.
The AMOD came with a little band so you can clip the tracker to your belt or to a bag. I clipped it onto a belt loop when i went out. It’s neither heavy nor big enough to get in the way, which is a plus.
Once you have turned it on, you can basically forget about it. It has three lights on the front to show you that it is turned on and working and also to let you know if the signal is not strong enough (which can happen inside) or the memory of the AMOD is full. It has 128MB memory, which does not sound like much but is enough for 72 hours of tracking data! You can increase that timeframe by letting it only record your location every 5 or 10 seconds instead of every second.
it gets a bit more complicated once you are back home from your photo trip: the AMOD comes with a software you can use to embed the GPS data into your images but I haven’t tried that software yet. What I have been doing is the following: I import my photos into Aperture like normal and then use Ovolab Geophoto to match the photos to the GPS track, which is pretty easy. The AMOD records the time on GMT, so you just need to tell it the time zone your camera uses and any time your photo is off from the „official“ time (mine is off by 29 seconds). Then I just need to hit a button to embed the longitude and latitude in the EXIF of my RAW file and simply update the EXIF in Aperture. And voilá, my photos have GPS locations
I only checked the locations on a few photos from my first try and they were off by a few meters but that could be due to the device not being calibrated (which also just takes the push of a button) or my reading the time difference from my camera wrong.
Overall, I really, really like the device and how relatively easy it is to embed the data. Of course, it adds some extra steps to my workflow but the way I have set it up currently, I could add the locations any time after importing, it is not the first thing I have to do and I can go back and add locations for edited versions of photos (e.g., HDRs or Panoramas). Definitely a great option till I get a camera and/or memory card with a GPS chip embedded.
Where was I or My search for a GPS device
10/Apr/09 04:52
A trend in photography has been to add the GPS data to photos - be it on Flickr or in the newest version of iPhoto. Until recently I did my Geo-Tagging only for parts of my photos on Flickr (using Flickr Export for Aperture and Google Earth) but then I did a roadtrip, taking me to five different US states, with lots of photos in every city we visited and even more photos on the road. I know which photos were taken in which city but it would be cool to also know the street/actual location. It would be even more great for the pictures taken on the road... but like most cameras, mine does not have a GPS chip in it but I knew that there were external options, so I decided to take a first look at prices. When I was in Germany over Christmas someone showed me their Jobo photoGPS tracker, which gets attached to the flash mount but uses its own batteries and still forces you to use a software to attach the GPS data to your photos. When I looked up the price, I decided against any immediate purchases... Then a few weeks back, Scott Kelby posted a review of the Jobo photoGPS on his Photoshop Insider blog. That one brought me even further away from buying it - but he recommended another option, the di-GPS, which I found relatively easily on the Internet. Then Macworld posted an article on Geo-Tagging your photos, listing a whole bunch of options, including a small device (Gisteq PhotoTrackr) you can put into your backpack/bag and then use with a software to add the GPS data to your Metatags. I thought about going with that one but then I saw on their website that their Mac software does not allow you to embed the GPS data into RAW files - and lets be honest, that is the main thing I want to do... before I found that, I saw on amazon that there is another, similar device (Amod AGL3080 GPS DataLogger) that will work with both Mac and Windows since it saves the GPS data in a standard open-source format, so that you only need a software that can read this file format. Since it was also cheaper than the other options, I decided to buy this one.
I received it on Friday and can’t wait to try it out. But the main thing I wanted to say with this article is: Read very careful before buying a GPS tracker to see that it actually does what you need it to. Important criteria might be that it can write the GPS to the existing metadata (and does not create its own sidecart file or overwrites your metadata) in your most used format (jpg will work almost always but be sure to check for your RAW-File type before buying!) and what kind of power it needs and how/if it needs to be connected to your camera. Also, if you need to use their software and how easy it is to get the files back to your photo app/organizing system.
I received it on Friday and can’t wait to try it out. But the main thing I wanted to say with this article is: Read very careful before buying a GPS tracker to see that it actually does what you need it to. Important criteria might be that it can write the GPS to the existing metadata (and does not create its own sidecart file or overwrites your metadata) in your most used format (jpg will work almost always but be sure to check for your RAW-File type before buying!) and what kind of power it needs and how/if it needs to be connected to your camera. Also, if you need to use their software and how easy it is to get the files back to your photo app/organizing system.
Avoiding catastrophe
22/Jan/09 21:08
CC photo: HULK SMASH by jk5854
One thing I have become very paranoid about in recent years is backing up my photos. The thought of losing all of my photos is something I don’t like to think about. There are too many memories associated with those photos and also just too many photos that I absolutely love to look at.
This paranoia has led me to a pretty decent routine regarding my photos (although it is not foolproof yet):
My main computer is an Apple MacBook Pro with a 250 GB harddrive, which is constantly at the edge of being full, therefore I don’t store my photos on my internal harddrive but have a dedicated external harddrive for my photo library - a small external that does not require me to have an external power source and that I can take with me easily (I’m carrying my MBP around with me almost everywhere anyway). To keep those photos save I make a back-up of them on the harddrive I do my regular backups of my laptop to (gotta love Time Machine and the backup functionality of Aperture).
When I am home in Germany I usually edit my photos at an iMac I bought specifically for this purpose (love the 24“ working space). On that computer I have my photos stored on the internal drive and do regular backups (every time I load new photos on the iMac I do a backup) onto a large 1TB external harddrive, which consists of two 500GB drives that are set up as RAID 1, so that both hard drives have the exact same content without me having to do anything - with RAID 1, all data is automatically mirrored onto the second drive. That way I have 3 copies of my library from the iMac - since that is my main photo library I wouldn’t want to have less backups.
When I’m back in Germany I also plan to buy an additional external drive onto which I do a backup and store it at my friend’s place. Why?, you ask? Well, currently all my backups are stored next to each other - which means a fire would kill all backups, theft would probably have the same result. I know, it is highly unlikely that something like that happens but it can happen...
Some of you might remark that online backups are an alternative for this but that is currently only true to a certain extent - while I have my favorite photos on Flickr, facebook and Picasa, it only covers parts of my photos, not all of them plus, I would lose the RAW versions of the photos.
I’m talking about all of this because the last months has been one long line of dying and crashing hard drives for me (kind of spooky, too). First my external drive that I use with my laptop died - luckily after I had transferred all pictures to the iMac since my second external had become too full to hold the back up of my road trip. Then the internal drive of a friend of mine died - she didn’t have any backups of her data! Luckily she didn’t use anything that cannot be replaced, but still - don’t let it happen, please! Yesterday my mom told me that the iMac was not booting anymore - apparently, from what I can tell from a continent away, the registry got corrupted when she did a hard reset because it had stopped responding - thankfully I have two full backups of my photos because the sad truth is: Harddrives break and die - or registries get corrupted (which oftentimes does not mean that you lose data but you might lose some). Don’t depend on luck, please!
If you want to read in more detail about different options for backups, Brian @ Epic Edits has written a whole series in his blog about photo backup. Starting with this article.
How a camera strap can make such a difference...
03/Nov/08 21:16
A few months back I had read several posts in german photography blogs about a new camera strap. I was thinking about getting one but forgot to do so until I read a blog post by Scott Kelby about that strap. After that I decided to finally get one. I was using the standard strap that comes with the camera until then. While I like that one, the camera can get pretty heavy if you carry it around your neck all day. This had gotten such a problem that I was wearing it around my shoulder half the day during my trip to Berlin last summer.
So now you are probably wondering about what kind of strap that is and how it makes a difference. The strap is called R-Strap and is made by Backrapid. It’s one of those things were you think: „Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?“. The strap is a basic shoulder strap with your camera attached to it, so that it will hang next to your hip while you are walking and you can just lift it up to your face for shooting pictures.
Because my explanation doesn’t do it any justice, here is a promo video where they show of how the R-Strap works:
I got mine several weeks back and was finally able to test it out last week when I visited the Zoo here in Atlanta with a friend of mine. I was carrying my Canon 40D with the 75-300mm IS lens attached, which is a pretty heavy and long combination. But all day I didn’t notice that I was carrying a camera - it was as if it weighs nothing! In fact, my Crumpler camera bag with my 60mm Macro lens and a bottle of water, on my other shoulder felt way heavier. Another great thing was that I didn’t have to be afraid for my lens when I was walking through crowded areas, since the camera was hanging at my hip in a way that the lens was protected from harm and didn’t swing at all while I was walking. I was really pleasantly surprised after my day in the zoo. I absolutely love my new camera strap!
Beware of the effects of flash
17/Okt/08 02:43
This week I was able to go out and photograph for the first time in over a month. It was an incredible feeling to be „out there“ again and being totally „in the zone“. I went to the Botanical Garden here in Atlanta. As always, i took lots of photos and I’ll publish a slideshow one of the next days but today I want to focus on something I realized once again when I was shooting inside the giant houses of the botanical garden: Flash changes a lot about your picture!
I was shooting handheld (I didn’t take my tripod to Atlanta with me), so I had to use the flash for some shots to get a sharp image. There is always a difference in picture between the two but I had one instance where the difference was truly astounding to me.
Here you have two photos that show exactly the same subject and perspective. The first one without flash, only natural light, and the second one with the flash of my 40D. Notice the difference in details but also in shading. A subtle difference is also the unfocussed part in the background. Notice the ground in the upper left area, it is much more pronounced in the picture with the flash.
I guess, what I am trying to say is that you should always try to be aware of the effects your flash will have on the look of your photo. It can make or break your shot if you aren’t aware of the effects. (Instant review on the display is a great way to ensure that it does not break your shot).
I was shooting handheld (I didn’t take my tripod to Atlanta with me), so I had to use the flash for some shots to get a sharp image. There is always a difference in picture between the two but I had one instance where the difference was truly astounding to me.
Here you have two photos that show exactly the same subject and perspective. The first one without flash, only natural light, and the second one with the flash of my 40D. Notice the difference in details but also in shading. A subtle difference is also the unfocussed part in the background. Notice the ground in the upper left area, it is much more pronounced in the picture with the flash.
I guess, what I am trying to say is that you should always try to be aware of the effects your flash will have on the look of your photo. It can make or break your shot if you aren’t aware of the effects. (Instant review on the display is a great way to ensure that it does not break your shot).
Extension Tubes
23/Jun/08 18:09
A bug on a rose petal
Link to this photo on Flickr
Summary: For my birthday I got three extension tubes for my camera. Here you’ll find a post on my first experiences with it including some first observations as well as three pictures I took using extension tubes. Feel free to check out the whole article by either clicking on „Read More“ below or the title of the blog entry
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