Four and a half years ago I wrote a post, Umbrellas are for rain!, and shared a few photos that Wen and I took outside using regular Nikon flashes with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.  It did certainly cross the line of not taking photography too seriously, but only by a little; after all, it’s just an umbrella!

My use of flash has decreased since then, from 33.5% at the time (with the D7000) to just 21% in 2015 (with the D800), in part because the full frame D800 can produce decent results even in fairly low light (even though it doesn’t hold a candle to something like the much newer D5).  At the same time, the lighting equipment I have available jumped into the truly ridiculous category (given that I still don’t think of myself as a photographer).    This was all thanks to gifts from my mom and Sugawara San, not due to my own going crazy!

elinchrom D-Lite 2

The elinchrom D-Lite 2 is an AC-powered studio flash unit.  It’s 100% manual; you’ve got to set exactly the power level you want, connect it to your camera with a cable, and it will fire every time you press the shutter button on your camera.  It works just as well with old film cameras as it does with modern DSLRs, but if you’re used to your flash automatically figuring out what the right power level is, then a unit like this will take some getting used to!

A pair of these came in a kit together with a softbox and a stands.  The softbox reflects and diffuses the light from the flash head itself, and creates a much bigger effective light source if you’re close to the object you’re taking a picture of.  Once assembled, the setup looks like this:

I now use these almost anytime I’m taking a picture of the types of things I post here – since I almost do those things at night when there’s no light available.  The manual operation seems a little daunting at first, but once you’ve used them once or twice it’s actually pretty easy since you’ll use the same settings basically every time.  These are often used for portraits and the like, but since everyone here is asleep I took a picture of a really old dusty toy instead:

Zoids!  I doubt anyone remembers those, but it was great to build them up out of smaller parts back in the 80s:

At first glance, it must seem ridiculous and expensive to get studio equipment – but it is surprisingly affordable.  For instance, if you just want to experiment, B&H sells a brand new, reasonably reviewed kit for $127, which includes the flash unit, softbox, and stand, and cable.  That kit has a 100W/s flash, as compared to the 200W/s D-Lite 2 – but I almost never use the D-Lite 2 above half power – and 100W/s is a good bit more than almost any camera-mounted flash.  It’s also much cheaper than a TTL flash of similar power from your camera vendor, despite having a stand and softbox.  It’s not for everyone, but if you take lots of indoor pictures I’d definitely recommend giving it a try!

Bowens esprit 2

If the shopping trip to Glazers that picked up the elinchrom kit had ended with the above, that would already have been well beyond my needs.  But, there was an apparently “great deal” on something that goes so far beyond what I need (especially given the low noise levels on current digital cameras) that I have basically never used it.  That deal was on a Bowens espirit 2, which is a 1000W/s light cannon that allows you to engage the sun in direct combat:

I’m not kidding about the sun thing; 1/10th that power is already enough to take pictures at ISO 100 f/8, but if you want to get rid of those pesky shadows for a subject that’s actually standing out in the sun, then this thing is your ticket.  It’s also theoretically useful if you’re taking group photos, and need to cover a wider area in light.  Just don’t point this thing directly at people or you’ll blind them!  You really have to use a reflecting or shoot-through umbrella.

Firing this thing at full power really makes you feel like you’re already part of a Type II civilization.   Or a Star Wars villain, cranking the power to 100%, waiting for the green light to indicate that it is fully charged, and then pulling the trigger to blow away some unsuspecting victim.

Yongnuo RF-603N

Manual flash cables are kind of a pain, so it was great to discover the Yongnuo RF-603 radio transmitters!  Whereas fancy RF units that support Nikon or Canon (or other’s) TTL systems (where the camera and flash figure out the right exposure for you) cost around $200, a pair of these go for just $27!

These small battery powered devices are actually really versatile and useful, and I highly recommend them.  You can do any of the following with two or more units:

• Connect one unit into your camera’s remote release (using a cable like the one shown on the right), and use the other to remotely trigger your camera.  This seriously beats setting a timer and running back into a group shot, and it’s way cheaper than what your own camera maker will try and sell you, plus it is radio frequency so you don’t need to point at the camera and look foolish in your own picture.

• Put a unit in your camera hotshoe, and trigger any hotshoe-based flash (like the one you may already own) remotely.  If your camera/flash don’t have built in features for remote operation, this is a really cheap way to get this capability – though it does require that you can set power on your flash manually (or that it defaults to max power).  This also lets your synchronize multiple flashes.

• Same as the above, but attaching a PC sync cable to fire flash units like the two I mentioned above.

The nice thing about the RF-603 is that the shutter release vs. flash release are independent signals, so you can do two of the above concurrently!  This allows a single unit to be used in your camera both to trigger the shutter and to remotely fire a flash.

Power Comparison

Just for fun, I took a few comparison shots that illustrate the power levels of different flash options.  All of these are at (or adjusted to) ISO 100, f/5.6.  I used the following:

• D800 built-in flash
• Nikon SB-400, the first flash I ever purchased.  The main benefit it adds is the ability to bounce off the ceiling.
• Nikon SB-800, a larger unit that uses 4 AA batteries and has been my primary flash for many years.
• elinchrom D-Lite 2
• Bowens esprit 2

First up, the D800 built-in flash.  Unsurprisingly, at ISO 100, it lacks the power to light things up even at f/5.6:

Next, the Nikon SB-400, which actually had slightly less output (but perhaps a little more dispersion):

Finally, the SB-800 started to deliver enough power to brighten things up a bit.  I think it’s equivalent to about a 90W/s, so you’d expect this.   Of course, when operating the SB-800 at full power, you have to wait a long time for it to recharge:

The elinchrom D-Lite 2 has similar apparent brightness, but only because it had much wider dispersion; you’ll notice that more of the background is visible than with the SB-800.  It’s roughly twice the power of the SB-800, but also recharges quicker at full power due to having AC power:

Finally, the Bowens really lights things up – you can see much further into the forest behind the garden area.  The photo understates how blindingly bright this was, especially at night.  It also shows how anything even remotely near the Bowens will be over-exposed, even at ISO 100, unless you stop down to at least f/8 or so:

Take that, sun!

Somehow, I managed not to post a single thing in the entirety of last year!  Switching roles at work, a permanent backlog of photos to be processed that took me till this year to get through, the manual labor to refresh our home theater room – there just never seemed to be the time.  Not that this year is likely to be any different!

One thing I’d put off from 2014 was mentioning a lens I picked up that year, the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art:

A 50mm standard prime is normally considered pretty “boring”; it generally can’t do close ups with nice background blurring, nor can it capture panoramic landscapes.  Nonetheless, it’s one of the most common primes on a full frame sensor (with 35mm being equivalent on a 1.5x crop camera).  In fact, my own tendency to use primes started with the Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AF-D back in 2009; after seeing the improvement in image quality over my 18-200mm superzoom, I started leaning much more heavily towards primes.

Despite the Nikon 50mm kicking off this trend, I didn’t ultimately use it that much.  The fabulous, inexpensive Nikon 35mm f/1.8G was a better match for the crop cameras I used until 2012, and by the time I went full frame, I’d picked up the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G AF-S; it didn’t have as wide an aperture as the Nikon 50mm, but it had superior optical quality and focus speed/accuracy despite being a zoom lens.

So it was a bit of a gamble when Sigma introduced the 50mm “Art” lens pictured above.  It had a number of fabulous early reviews, and amazing sample shots even when used at f/1.4 or f/2.0, but it was unclear whether I’d wind up preferring it over the 24-70mm that was seeing the most usage at that time.  To keep things short: it did, and I kept more shots with this lens – 30% of what I took in 2015 – than with any other.

The image above is from a visit to the Batu Caves in Malaysia; there’s lots of monkeys roaming around, in some cases looking for things they can snatch from unaware passers by!  There was an extremely strong backlight – the monkey isn’t against a totally white background because I lured it into a studio or as a result of heavy editing.  Normally this would cause flare galore, and a strong lost of contrast – especially when shooting at f/2.8 as in the above photo.  But despite the worst of conditions, the Sigma managed an image that I really like.

The above is also from Batu Caves, and shows the incredibly strength of a bunch of red ants that were carrying this dead cockroach back towards their nest.  Amazingly, the ants you see pictured here were able to lift that massively bigger carcass up a vertical stretch, at least until gravity won out and destroyed their progress; it was pretty amazing teamwork nonetheless.  In any case, the Sigma 50mm is no macro lens but it’s sharpness even at wide apertures – this one is also f/2.8 – coupled with the high resolution of the D800 makes it possible to capture some pretty small things without dragging a dedicated macro lens around.

Even at f/1.4, as in the above shot, the detail in the very narrow band that’s actually in focus at that aperture is just incredible.  The Nikon 50mm would lose contrast and sharpness across the entire frame if you had to use it wide open; that wasn’t the case here, and the bokeh feels very nice to me especially for a standard prime.

Every lens has drawbacks, and for the Sigma, that’d be weight and price; its very solid construction yields an 815g lens that is very close to the weight of the 24-70mm zoom, and at $950 it’s significantly cheaper than Nikon’s high-end 58mm f/1.4, but significantly more expensive than the $350 it cost for my older Nikon 50mm f/1.4 (or Sigma’s own non-Art version of the same).  Still I’m completely without regrets in having picked up this lens!

It wasn’t that long ago – 21 months, to be exact – that I joked that Nikon’s updated prime lenses seemed to be for people who were made of money.  But as I mentioned when starting to blog at all, one of the great things about it is having to look back and eat my words or laugh at my own foolishness. I just thought it’d take closer to a decade for that to happen, but it looks like I’ve already reached that point.

If you’ve followed what I’ve posted here the last couple of years, you’ll already have noted that I’ve some hypocritically moved from having amateur skills and decent but amateur equipment, to having amateur skills and professional level gear. What led to this? No, I didn’t glance down and realize that I was actually made of money and that I could thus lose weight by spending it (though that would be nice). In large part, it was the realization (such as with selling my 10-24 ultra-wide lens) that lenses really are a capital investment, and that even buying new you don’t lose that money. A related factor was buying everything used in the first place off of craigslist. Finally, living in the U.S. has the double benefit of lower taxes and a much wider range of highly competitive online merchants.

So, in July of last year, when a 24/1.4 showed up on craigslist (a relatively rare occurrence) at a good price, I did what I thought I’d never do and bought one:

Did I really need this lens? Definitely not – it’s overkill for a non-photographer, especially since I already had the fantastic 24-70 f/2.8 zoom lens that has awesome image quality and is just a couple of stops slower. That said, the 24/1.4 has quickly become one of my most used lenses, in large part because going to f/1.4 or even to f/2.0 really crosses that threshold of being able to take low light shots with no flash at reasonable shutter speeds – especially in combination with a full frame camera. Indeed, 36% of the shots I’ve kept from this lens have been at f/2.0 or wider; that increases to 42% if I exclude one batch of 100 photos at my cousin’s wedding tea ceremony  (which were all taken at f/5.6 with a flash).

Here’s one example, of my friend Ahmad holding his young daughter:

Even at a relatively slow 1/80th of a second, the above was already at ISO 800 even at f/1.4.  Even a big f/2.8 zoom would have pushed things up to ISO 3200; a kit lens would have cost another stop beyond that. Of course, conditions get much more extreme than that – for example, the following from my cousin Mike & Jackie’s wedding this past summer:

While I did play with the color, the shot itself was outside, hand-held, close to midnight, at a 1/40th shutter speed and ISO 6400 (the highest native ISO that the D800 supports). With a slower lens, I’d simply have needed a tripod – and I never take one with me, so I wouldn’t even try and take things like the above. Finally, here’s one of Olivia, with identical settings to the above:

Twice a week (on “no dessert” days), at bedtime, Olivia’s allowed to read a book herself on the tablet instead of reading a paper book with me – and when I say “read”, what I’m actually talking about the “Read To Me” mode of Dr. Seuss books on Android that read the story while highlighting the words. The only source of light above is what’s coming from my Nexus 7 – which is already on the lowest possible brightness settings since there’s zero ambient light. It’s no lie to say that the camera sees much better in the dark than I do.

So far, I just talked about how amazing it is to have an f/1.4 lens to shoot with; you could do much of the above with a vastly cheaper 50/1.4, unless you really did need to be wide (which sometimes you do). The 28/1.8 which is also 1/3rd the price is pretty darn close too (and I almost went with that option). But between truly getting wide, having an amazing close-focus distance, great AF in general, and really nice (for a wide prime) bokeh, I’ve been really happy with the the lens. As a final example, here was a quick test shot in the garden soon after I got the lens:

While that’s not the best bokeh example by any stretch, for a 24mm focal length I thought it was pretty decent.  But even more impressive, and the main reason for using this photo as an example, is how darned close I actually was to the bee – remember that this is equivalent to a 16mm lens on a crop camera! A crop from the above might provide a better idea:

It feels totally absurd to live at a time when you can stick a very wide angle lens on a camera, shove it right in the face of a bee, depend on auto-focus to get everything right – and get something with the detail of the above, but hey, I’m not complaining!

Ultimately, you have to be pretty crazy to get a lens like this for casual snapshots in the middle of the night with only a tablet as a light source, but I’ve used it more than anything else I own since buying it.  And it helps when I tell myself that I can probably sell it for pretty much what I paid for it – even after I get a few thousand shots with it!

I have completely neglected posting anything for 3 months – and it’s now hours away from 2013!  Perhaps it just didn’t seem worthwhile with the supposed end of the world upon us, but with that excuse out of the way, I guess I should stop procrastinating.  In fact, there’s a whole set of things I’d meant to share that have collected in open tabs and the like, but I’ve been really busy and never got to any of it. I’ll try and start working through the queue with an update to the list of Things I Use – this time, for audio. I didn’t take the pictures for any of these, images are from the product makers!

Google Nexus Q

I was fortunate enough to get to try the Nexus Q shortly before it was introduced at Google I/O (and to keep it afterwards). While there was much debate of the Q vs. other video streaming boxes, I have to say that as an audio-only device it does quite well at filing a fairly particular niche.

For many years, I struggled to find an effective way to stream music to stereo speakers at high quality within my home, so that I wouldn’t have to actually find a physical CD to hear something. I wasn’t so concerned with online music streaming, because Canada had no viable services that you could actually sign up for (and when I started this pursuit, back around 2002, none existed anywhere). Storage, even with lossless compression, was a non-issue even a decade ago.  I just wanted a CD player replacement.

My first attempt involved building something myself. Using a mini-ITX PC, a PCI Soundblaster card with a digital audio out (to a DAC), a fanless case and power supply, and a stripped down Linux configured to boot from LAN, I was able to get something up and running. It took a ton of effort – I had to tweak and compile drivers for the Soundblaster due to the lack of standard glibc in that micro-Linux distribution! It’s funny looking back, because I’m far too lazy today to do something like this. Unfortunately, sound quality was terrible, even with a high quality external D/A converter, because the Soundblaster resampled everything to a fixed 48kHz output rate.  All my 44.1kHz sampled music (from CD) was being put through this process, and didn’t sound like the original CD. This was improved by forcing the music player to do its own 48kHz resampling with a better algorithm, but still, with no remote control, the system really wasn’t too usable, and I barely made use of it.

Next, I was probably one of the only owners of the optional Playstation 2 Ethernet accessory, which I think cost somewhere around $100, and which I used exclusively for media streaming. The PS2 had good connectivity into my A/V system at the time, so this had promise. I used the QCast Tuner software for media streaming, and it worked OK but was intermittent in terms of reliability. And I still needed to go stick the QCast Tuner disk into my PS2 and boot it up to play anything, which was actually slower than finding a CD, so I never really used this much either.

Finally, in 2005, along came the Squeezebox 3.  At $299 without Wi-Fi for something that played music only, it was a little pricey, even at the time – but it was a great device that I use actively even today.  It has great usability, a nice onboard DAC, plays music in almost any format, and even does true lossless audio – a DTS-encoded 5.1 audio stream encoded into the 1.5Mbit/s audio format used on CD plays back flawlessly, in surround sound.  It’s analog audio outputs can be configured, if desired, to be volume controlled in order to directly drive a power amp.  It was what I’d tried twice to come up with, but in a form factor that actually worked.

The Nexus Q delivers something similar, and improves in some areas by integrating an amp that can drive speakers directly. I was pretty skeptical about the power and quality of an amp that would fit inside the sphere, but was impressed when I actually tested things.  It drove my Axiom M2 v2’s higher than I’d practically need before there was notable distortion (though you could definitely tell when you hit that point), and worked even better when paired with an old pair of Infinity Compositions Overture 2’s; those speakers have built-in powered subwoofers and seem to be the perfect companion for the Q. A bonus to getting rid of the external amp is that you can just play things at any time without powering the amp on or off (the Squeezebox didn’t have 12v triggers for this). Controlling playback entirely via an Android phone was something I was already doing with my Squeezeboxes, and it’s far better than traditional remotes.

Some bemoaned the lack of integration with other services like Spotify and Pandora, but as my goal was listening to music I own which was easily uploaded to Google Play, this wasn’t an issue for me. The lack of pre-amp outs mean I can’t connect the Q into bigger speakers, like my old Magnepan MG-IIIs, and when paired my with Axioms, there was no easy way to connect my subwoofer. Still, for certain room  & speaker configurations, the Q as shown at I/O was a good alternative to something pricier like a Sonos.

Emotiva USP-1

For quite some time, I’d just directly connected my Squeezebox into my power amp. There are a couple of drawbacks to this setup. The most obvious is that if you want to use anything else as a source of audio – like a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray player- you can’t. The second, which I only learned of a little later, is that volume is applied via digital attenuation. But even with a perfect DAC, if you’re using this approach with a 16-bit input signal (which is what CDs are encoded at) and have a 24-bit DAC, you can only chop off 8 bits before you’re killing off useful bits to lower volume. 8 bits is roughly -24dB of attenuation, and I’m often below that volume level.

The main reason I’d started connecting things directly is because I’d lost two previous pre-amps; a re-purposed Sony TA-E9000ES that died, and a true analog pre-amp (with no remote) that had become persistently flaky in one channel. So when Emotiva did their summer sale this year, I picked up the USP-1.  I quite liked the UPA-2 2-channel amp I purchased a year earlier, and Emotiva’s overall philosophy of good build quality, reasonable prices, low marketing/distribution costs appeal to me.

Without having done meaningful tests of the USP-1 versus other preamps in an identical configuration, I can’t say much about its performance, other than to note that it sounds perfectly adequate and at least as good as the direction connection approach without either of the drawbacks I mentioned above.

Audioengine D1

For many years, I tolerated the built-in audio support for my PC. I’m not sure why, as it’s often been the case that internal audio solutions have picked up audible hiss or interference. The Realtek solution in my Dell was no exception to this; it has all kinds of high frequency buzzing on its outputs that I don’t understand why I waited so long to get rid of.  In any case, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was getting a Das Keyboard mechnical keyboard a year ago; this meant I no longer had volume control buttons on the keyboard, which was pretty inconvenient while playing something like Starcraft.  The Audioengine D1 was pretty pricey solution to this problem at $169, but I really wasn’t satisfied with the audio from my PC, and reviews on the D1 were great, so I decided to go ahead.  I’m sure there were more economical solutions to the problem, and I don’t think the D1 really added $169 of value for me, but it did solve the problems I was dealing with.  And had I waited, I would probably have gone with an even greater level of overkill.

Speaker Stands

Truth be told, I was hoping for a little more improvement in audio quality with the D1. However, playing around a little, it was clear that speaker placement was the biggest issue. If I lowered my ears to desk level, things sounded much better. And indeed, recommended desktop speaker placement all recommended elevation so that speakers were at least on-axis with your ears, perhaps tilted upwards a little to avoid reflections off the desk. Sadly, the number of people who care about this is small enough that there were virtually no reasonable 4″ – 6″ desktop speaker stands; people either made their own or used stacks of CDs and the like.  I opted to use a few spare rolls of painters tape as a temporary solution to at least get some clearance off the desk, and it definitely helped!

I meant to share a couple of photos that I found interesting. The first is of some waterdrops caught in the various spiderwebs we have around our house. Close up, they look somewhat surreal – it’s a real testament to the relative strength of the web that what look like huge globes of water are suspended by near-invisible threads:

The above was near the ground; our shrubs had one that looked more like the spray of a shower:

Like virtually all photos I post, you can click the above to enlarge to see more detail, if you’re interested.

The second picture is more one of those “I wish I brought my camera” moments. In my last post, I mentioned my 8-day effort to undo a bunch of recent weight gain. That involved a lot of walking, since walking doesn’t tend to leave you in a disabled state like an excess amount of other types of exercise can. Kirkland has many nice trails that make walking enjoyable if you have the time, and on one fine summer day, there was a great sunset – and an interesting glass sculpture to go along with it. Sadly, the only device I was carrying was my Galaxy Nexus – a great phone, but no better than average as a smartphone camera. The image I got kind of works at reduced web sizes – but totally fails to capture how nice the actual scene was when you try and view it much bigger.

The next day, I walked the same route but with the D800 this time. Regrettably, while it wasn’t overcast or anything, conditions completely paled in comparison to the day before. I might not even have stopped to take a shot if not for comparative purposes! Still, the ridiculous dynamic range of modern cameras helped capture much detail that was lost in the above shot:

A different angle:

It’s a shame the conditions the second day weren’t anywhere close the first day, but I guess you can never tell how things will turn out.

I posted some 4th of July fireworks pictures on Google+, noting that I was pretty impressed that a relatively small town like Kirkland managed to put on a nice display out over the water. While you could see the bigger show going on in Seattle at a distance, what we got locally was pretty cool.

It’s been two and a half weeks since then, but I thought I’d follow up and share the rest of the pictures I took (via the slideshow/gallery link below), and mention how helpful ubiquitous Internet access was in learning the basics of how to even go about taking these shots. I don’t shoot much landscapes or scenery – our kids are my primary subject – and I don’t think I’ve ever left the house with a tripod before. But since the family, minus myself, went off to Toronto on the morning of July 4th, I had the opportunity to give it a try – plus Olivia had already started to say that she’d like to see the fireworks, even though she knew she was leaving that morning. Some of the basics – using longer exposures, keeping ISO relatively low – were sort of intuitively obvious. But at least one simple thing – using bulb mode to manually control the start and end of each exposure – helped greatly, but just isn’t something I would have thought of, since bulb mode just isn’t something I’ve really ever used. Another thing that clear in retrospect but that I didn’t figure out on my own is that like flash, the brightness of the fireworks themselves aren’t really affected by exposure time, so picking the right aperture (usually f/8 to f/11) is actually more important.  One thing that’s kind of neat – shooting at base ISO and f/8 means a basic camera and kit lens would be perfectly sufficient!

So, thank you Galaxy Nexus + Chrome for Android + Google Search + experienced photographers who share freely + a lengthy wait for the fireworks to actually start – this first real attempt at this subject matter turned out much better than it would have otherwise  (I say “real attempt” because I snapped some handheld shots on Canada Day a couple of years ago while holding a crying Olivia with the other hand).

(Slideshow which links to gallery below – won’t show up in RSS)