Shutter speed and equestrian sports

I visited the family farm this weekend and tried my hands at shooting live action. In this case it was my sister riding her new pony and trying out some jumping exercises.

From my previous attempt I knew that the shutter speed often needs to be way lower than expected. Freezing high-speed movement requires 1/1000 sec or much lower, and a moving horse is just acceptable between 1/500 to 1/1000.

Bumping ISO to 800 and the shutter speed to 1/640 (F4.5) resulted in the pictures below:



I borrowed my fathers Nikon D80 for this which is a very good camera but that introduces a fair amount of noise with high ISO values. The image has been noise corrected - the new Lightroom options are magic as shown below (before to the left):


I only had a 18-70mm lens for this exercise, would probably need a new position or a longer lens to get really close. Would love to try this with a 50mm 1.4 though, fast enough to really freeze things.

As a bonus, a proud cat on a car with dirty paws:

The Sartorialist - Snaps of others

Well, this is probably an obstacle I want to get over at some point or other, illustrated in that "Syria"-video below as well - photographing people unknown to me. This guy has made a highly successful career out of it (bought his "book"). I'm just trying to imagine what the conversation would be like!

Architecture arts

Re-discovering the city using a camera is eye-opening. When I have some time over I will try to read up on the major architecture styles as in general I have no clue of what it is I'm photographing beyond the basic forms. This at least is curtains awnings.

Five minutes of Syria

Would be just great to summarize my next trip in this way :) From the comments:
* He spent three weeks there
* Canon 5d mark II with 70-200mm IS and a 50 mm 1,8
* Everything shot hand-held without stabilization
* Video grading achieved by converting the file to CMYK format and then boosting the Cyan channel, apparently the standard way to achieve that "movie" look

Bat(man) on Fire

Bat(man) on Fire a photo by minamac88 on Flickr.

Had some luck with light-painting during Christmas with my new flash and torches, but this is a way cooler version from down under :) Exif information here

Nordic photographers

To learn more on what is possible with photography I have visited a few different venues to learn the names and works of some established photographers. I have by no means enough experience to really have a strong opinion but below are some of those that I find really interesting for one reason or other. One of these days I need to dive deeper into the whole history of the thing...

Morten Krogvold



Norwegian Black and White photographer, winner of several awards. Saw him first on the annual photography fair, the photo of Nelson Mandela is just stunning, as well as the Italy series. (Note: I got the portfolio pages to work in IE, other browsers may only see the first image)

Sandra Freij



Swedish fashion photographer with very vivid and dreamy photos. A lot going on, and those shots are really beautiful up close

Mikael Jansson



Just bought his "Speed of life" book, covering Formula one racing in a new way. A Swedish fashion photographer with some seriously heavy merits.

Will try to find more as a I go. As I was searching for links to this I also found this site: 500 Photographers by Pieter Wisse containing a wealth of links and images. Will dive in once I have more time :)

Photography and the iPad

On one of my US trips during the autumn I finally surrendered and bought an iPad. Besides being a really laid back device for reading websites and news it has some really interesting features for photography. Below are some of the applications and stuff I've found that makes taking photos easier and more inspired. Some might even work for the iPhone.

Simple DOF calculator
Easily calculate depth of field based on camera, f-stop, lens and focus point. Really nice for experimentation

Lights, Camera, Capture!
More or less a whole book on lighting theory and practice for a ridiculously low price. Includes a wealth of videos for nearly every shot where the photographer describes how he took it and considerations he had to make. Goldmine.

Lightroom 3 101 tutorials
Three HOURS of high quality video based Lightroom tutorials, walking through nearly every aspect of the application. A highly recommended full-on course in the workflow, with explanations of some settings and features that may otherwise have been overlooked but that greatly simplifies the process.

Introduction to the Canon T2i : Advanced Topics
Relatively expensive video based course that in detail goes through the more advanced options available on the camera I have. Given that the camera wasnt exactly cheap to begin with, I see this as an investment to get the most out of what I've already paid for. High-paced tempo and a lot of information packed into this, some of which I will be returning to when I have more experience.

Digital Photographer Magazine
There are many photography-focused magazines in the store, this is the one I'm currently following. Prices for single issues is about a third of what a regular paperbased copy would cost, and it is much quicker to browse through. Geared towards the beginner/mid-range photographer there are some very basic but also fairly advanced stuff in here

The Photographer's Ephemeris
I havent actually bought or tried this yet, but from the description it has some features that seem really interesting. The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) helps you plan outdoor photography shoots, particularly landscape and urban scenes. It is a map-centric sun and moon calculator: see how the light will fall on the land, be it day or night, for any location on earth. You can even determine when the sun or moon will be visible behind nearby hills and mountains.

I also have to mention the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit, a fairly cheap piece of gear that expands the use of the device immensely. When plugged in, you can import photo directly from the camera (even standard RAW-formats) and get immediate feedback on that great display. It also unlocks more advanced photo management options in the device, that strangely enough are not present in the normal configuration. This is great in combination with the free version of Photoshop Express for more advanced editing. The USB connector also opens up new functionality such as keyboards, speakers and microphones. Some of this is broken in the new update, but still...

(Pet peeve - Safari on the iPad can only load ~6Mb of images on one page before it starts showing question marks instead of images, seriously limiting some photo sites)

Any other applications/stuff you use? iPad/iPhone/Android/whatever?

What's in the bag

On the equipment side - found some really neat videos where photographers talk about their gear. Learned a lot by just listening to them.

First up - DSLR video, interesting guy (and cats):



Second - freelance photographer (not as laid back, may not be a shining example but has some interesting stuff):


A bunch of other videos here.

We Are Super Famous

An inspiration more or less every day - their archives are a true goldmine:WEARESUPERFAMOUS.com

The Big Picture

One of my favourite sources for news photography is "The Big Picture" from Boston.com. Each month they publish some amazing shots from both key news events and some more random events. Always of an amazing quality, highly recommended.



Egypt - the wait




Dakar 2011

Other great series:
2010 in photos, part 1
2010 in photos, part 2
2010 in photos, part 3

Lightroom collections

Imported all my existing photos into Lightroom and consolidated over ten years worth of files into one massive, easily backed-up, folder. With 10 000+ shots its getting more important to leverage the full functionality of the Library module. Meta-data filtering is fantastic and I am sketching on a keyword structure that will actually work (hopefully).

In the meantime I'm using Scott Kelbys method for using collections to quickly sort through events and "keeper" shots. Apart from the proposed structure, the most important lesson I took away from this were the keyboard shortcuts - those really cut away a lot of boring time.

Scott Kelby: How I use Lightroom’s Collections

Photo books

Currently working hard at understanding DTP software such as Scribus to be able to develop better-looking photo books. First attempt was a success but revealed some shortcomings in the workflow, such as a poorly calibrated monitor :( The images came out a bit dark... Will try to get hold on a Spyder 3 to fix that.

Example of a nice book, if perhaps a bit overdone: Turkey

Now I also need access to a scanner to get maps and stuff into the library...