In New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh
There’s nothing you can’t do, now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you, let’s here it for New York
New York, New York

- Jay-z, Empire State of Mind

That was, without a doubt, my personal theme song during my whirlwind trip to New York City. It’s not like I haven’t been to the Big Apple before, but it had been a while, and I was really excited to get to try out the new Fujifilm X10, ultra-pocketable, retro-styled, X-series “point-and-shoot”. I do say point-and-shoot with some reservation however. To simply call this an expensive point-and-shoot really doesn’t do it justice. No, it’s not nearly as advanced a camera as it’s bigger brothers the X100 or interchangeable-lensed X-Pro, but it’s still a beautiful little camera to behold…and use.

Side-beside comparison of my most pocket-able (full-frame no less) 35mm camera...the laudable Minox 35GT, and the Fujifilm X10.

First, let me address a pressing question: would I use this in a professional shoot? In a word, no. In three words, yes and no. No, I wouldn’t go on a paid pro shoot with the X10, and only the X10, in hand. The images just aren’t up to the quality we’re all used to getting out of our DSLRs (that cost 2 to 10 times the price of the X10). No, the lens isn’t anything to write home about, and night shots can be a bit noisy, and the sensor doesn’t handle highlights particularly well (with obvious blooming around lights). But, on the other hand, I don’t always want to carry an expensive, heavy, DSLR around with me everywhere. With the X10, I have no such reservations. I also wouldn’t hesitate submitting an image from the X10 to any number of print or online publications. The images that come out of this little guy are actually good enough for the majority of publications out there. Yes, that might say more about most publications, rather than the quality of the camera, but none the less…it’s pretty good.

Second, I need to mention the built-in panorama feature. The X10 isn’t the first camera to have this feature, but it’s worth noting that the X10 does a pretty good job of doing in-camera what I might never get around to doing back at the studio, which means that it’s fantastic. The X10 motion panorama feature can be set up to 360 degrees, and works for both horizontal and vertical capture. I had a lot of fun with this…why don’t our DSLRs have this??

Panoramas work best for still subjects, like landscapes (below). If you look carefully at the first image from Grand Central Station, you can see where someone was moving quickly, the X10 captured the same person several times and he (and I) moved across the image.

Metering can be both a bit tricky and inconsistent, particularly with backlit subjects. This shot of the Guggenheim took far too many exposures to get right in my view. Hopefully a firmware update will smooth the metering out a bit.

For random holiday snaps, this camera is easy to recommend, even to someone who is more of an “Auto” mode shooter. This camera can be used in full-manual mode, but it’s Auto mode is really quite good. Nothing to cough at.

But having that manual option is great for things like, dragging the shutter or exposing for long-exposure night shots.

The Fuji X10 is also quite good in dimly lit situations, because of it’s  f/2.0 lens. If you shoot at a low ISO, with a wide aperture, you’ll get great results. However, if you’re shooting hand-held (which is where this camera will be used 99% of the time), and you have to bump up the ISO, watch out. Noise levels go up quickly and dramatically. Plus, it does have a tendency to create blown out blooming highlights (note that the rope-light under the hand rail in the last image is made of very small, well separated lights, but came out as a bit of a blob here).

Conclusion:

If you’re tired of crappy images from your smart-phone (yes, even you, iPhone 4S users), but don’t want to lug around a big DLSR and are on a budget (a Leica M9-P with 50mm lens would work quite nicely, except for the $12,000 price-tag), it’s hard not to recommend the Fuji X10. It’s an advanced camera I would happily recommend to other pros, but simple enough to recommend to my mom, and I’d certainly buy one for myself.

Until next time.
J R BERNSTEIN

Remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

All images Copyright J R BERNSTEIN, 2012.
 

Inspired by The Tree of Life, by Terrence Malick.

Best viewed on a large colour calibrated display, full-screen at 1080p, with studio monitors or HD headphones, or in a home-theatre. (Watching on your iPad, you’ll miss the entire bass track without good headphones.)  Also best viewed in a darkened room, for effect.
Composed of still images shot with a Fuji S5 Pro and Nikon ED AF Nikkor 80-200mm 1:2.8 lens, from my back deck in Toronto ON Canada.

Very minimal post editing in Adobe Lightroom, and assembled in Adobe After Effects.  No added colours or effects.

Done, start to finish, in one afternoon.
My first short film and my first time using After Effects.

To my surprise, I felt most comfortable starting with the end and working backwards within After Effects.  That is, I first put together the sound track, to give me my points of reference.  With the sound track down, I created the ending, backwards, frame by frame starting with the final frame (titles added afterwards).  I then worked on the opening sequence.  And finally, I filled in the middle.

If you’ll notice, the there is a clear progression throughout the film, starting from fast and light images of clouds, progressing to the climax of slowly moving images that have a “fiery” space-like quality, to the dénouement of the sun alone.

The opening sequence has a very earth-like feel. Every day we move quickly through our lives, seeing a myriad of images throughout.  But as we go out further into space, the concept of size becomes unobtainable, and time appears to slow to a snail’s pace.  This is the idea behind the slow moving images as the film progresses.  Deeper into the film, and deeper into space, and the images become more fiery, violent, and unfamiliar.  The musical climax is matched to the visual climax, as we pan out to a scene with a blue streak across the heavens.  The blue streak is intentional lens flare, and is not added in post.  (No visuals were added in post.)  The deliberate break in the music sound track is done to both emphasise the rumbling bass track and to set up the last shots.  I added the bass track to give the visuals some added ‘weight’; the conceptual sound of an unforgiving violent space.  During the musical break is one of my favourite scenes, starting at 3:13.  This was done by taking a series of images of clouds as they approached the sun, and then blending them together in After Effects. It is in this scene that the musical sound track starts again and sets up the ending. Finally, the ever-present sun is all that remains, when the earthly clouds and strange heavenly scenes have long gone.

I decided to title this film “Perspectives” due to the impact that can be achieved by capturing a common every-day scene (you can’t get much more “every-day” than looking up at the sky!).  I’m quite proud of this work.  I think I was able to take some simple photographs of some clouds as they passed by the sun, and turn them into (what I think is) an ‘epic’ looking sci-fi space adventure.

Sometimes, the most humbling thing we can do is look up.

J R BERNSTEIN
Always be capturing.

J R BERNSTEIN

Because the L-758DR has a nifty little USB port used when profiling your camera/film, I thought the first thing to check was the Sekonic website for a firmware update. No such luck. The meter’s specs are clearly stated as “ISO 3-8000 (in 1/3 steps)”. Well, that’s really too bad, I thought to myself thinking that I’m going to need to go out and buy a new meter…and who, by the way, is using ISO 3?!? The lowest ISO film I’ve ever used is Kodak Ektar ISO 25 and the lowest digital backs only go down to ISO 50.

But I digress…

Not taking “no” for an answer, I went on a hunt for a work-around, and a-ha!  My beloved meter has the ability to set Exposure Compensation…up to 9.9 FULL STOPS of +/- compensation! To access Exposure Comp. on the L-758DR, while pressing ISO 1 and ISO 2 at the same time, rotate the jog wheel to change the value.

So what does that mean? Well, simply put, there’s a lot of life left in this mighty little meter! I would also assume that other meters of similar quality and features have similar exposure compensation, so this may apply to your meter too, even if it’s not a L-758DR.

Warning, Science ahead!!!  If you just want to know how to set your meter for ISO 102400, set your ISO to 6400 and your Exposure Comp. to +4.  If you want to know how to calculate that (or any other value), read on…

Here’s a basic re-cap of ISOs, F-stops, and shutter-speeds. Remember that, for every increase in one FULL aperture value (smaller number = bigger aperture) or one FULL decrease in shutter speed, 2x as much light reaches the recording surface (digital sensor in this case). Also, for every FULL step up in ISO speed, 1/2x as much light is necessary for a proper exposure. So, when we talk about Exposure Compensation (in EV units), +1EV, twice as much light gets in vs. 0EV. So +1EV = 1 f-stop = 1/2x shutter speed = +1 ISO unit, OR +1EV = +1 ISO unit. Ergo, we can calculate the Exposure Compensation needed for any particular ISO.

Mathematically, we can calculate this by:

Where

ISO₁ is the starting ISO value
ISO₂ is the newly calculated ISO value we want to figure out
EV is the Exposure Value compensation

So if we plug in the meter maximum values we get:

Meaning that the maximum ISO value that the Sekonic L-758DR can effectively calculate is ISO 7,643,406…or 5.9 full stops higher than the highest value any dSLR is currently capable of!

But what if we want to calculate the EV required when shooting the D3s at ISO 102400? Easy, all we have to do is re-work the equation and solve for EV! Thusly…

Ta-da! But not so fast…because our calculators only calculate log in base 10 and we’re trying to calculate log in base 2, we have to do the following to convert our equation to log base 10:

And now we finally have a working equation we can calculate the required EV needed for any particular ISO!  Try it, it works! (But don’t forget your brackets and order of operations.)

So let’s try an easy one.  What’s the EV value needed to go from ISO 3200 to ISO 400? Just sub in your numbers and solve:

EV = -3!  Which we can prove by working it out manually.  That is, half of 3200 is 1600 (-1 EV), half of 1600 is 800 (-1 EV), and half of 800 is 400 (-1 EV).  So that’s 3 x -1 EV or -3 EV.

So if we want to calculate the EV needed for the Nikon D3s at ISO 102400, all we do is sub in the numbers ISO₁= 6400 (I’ll use ISO 6400 because it’s a full stop value and works out evenly…you could use 8000, but you’ll get a long decimal answer that’s hard to remember) and ISO₂= 102400 and solve:

So our answer is that we need +4 EV on our meters for ISO 6400 to be equivalent to ISO 102400.  And that’s it!

I hope you found this of use!
J R BERNSTEIN

Remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

So, I recently bought a Katz Eye Optics split-image focus screen for my Fuji S5 Pro DSLR (based on the Nikon D200/D300 body, but with Fuji’s own sensor).  Installation was easy and I managed to not break anything at the same time!

While this is not a review of the Katz Eyes focus screen, I have to say that it was worth every penny (of which there were many…about 14400 US pennies in fact)!  I’m now shooting with near 100% in-focus accuracy!  There may be other brands that are as good as or better and are cheaper or more expensive, but I can’t comment on any of those.

Katz Eye Optics Focus Screen for Fuji S5 Pro

So far, I’ve only run into one problem, and I’ve just been able to solve that problem.  The problem and solution are as follows:

When looking through the viewfinder of the Fuji S5 you can see (and select) the 11 AF points, one of which must always be selected.  This image is a composite image taken from the D200 manual showing all AF points selected over top the Katz Eye focus screen.

D200 Viewfinder - Default "Normal" AF setting

Did you notice that in the centre position the AF area nearly covers up the entire location where the split image prism is?  Yeah, me too!  With this highlighted area over top of the split-image prism, it makes it almost impossible to focus…not good.  So my stop-gap solution was to simply move the selected AF point off to the side.  Not great, but it worked.  The problem was that it was a) distracting and b) made the digital in-focus-indicator useless.

Well, after a bit of searching through the camera’s menus, looking for a way to turn off the AF indicator (with no luck), I came across an option that lets you set a “Wide” AF area.  This reduces the number of AF areas from 11 to 7 and changes the look of your AF selector to this:

D200 "Wide" AF mode

Did you notice how the split-image prism is no longer covered up by the centre AF zone?  Me too!

Problem solved!!!

Not only do I no longer have a distracting AF zone off to the side of the frame, I also regain the functionality of the digital in-focus-indicator!

So here’s how on the D200 (taken from the Nikon D200 manual):

1. Open Custom Setting Menu
2. Highlight Autofocus
3. Display options
4. Highlight a3 Focus Area Frame
5. Display options
6. Highlight Wide Frame (7 Areas)
7. Make selection.

And here’s how on the Fuji S5 Pro:

1. Press Setup button
2. Open Tab 1
3. Select AF
4. Select Focus Area Frame
5. Select “WIDE (7 AREAS)

Enjoy!
J R Bernstein

Remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

I thought this would be a good example of how versatile one single lighting setup can be.

The reason I wanted to post this particular photo is because it is using the exact same lighting setup as shown in Lighting Tutorial No. 1!  In fact, they were taken during the same shoot.  The only thing that has changed is the position of the model and the camera; the lighting and the background are static.

So why bother with a lighting tutorial where I have nothing new to show you?  Well, for no other reason but to prove that you don’t have to be messing around with a lot of expensive lighting gear all throughout your shoot in order to create interesting and varied shots.  The less you need to concentrate on the technical aspect of the shoot, the more you can focus (ha, ha…) on the quality of your photograph.

Enjoy!
J R Bernstein

And remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

Back “in the day”, residuals were easy money, sort of.  Let me explain.

Let’s say you do a head-shot.  How much can you charge for a simple headshot?  $100?  And how long does it take you?  Well, there’s studio set-up (or workspace set-up if you’re not in a studio), that might take you 20 minutes (more if you need to find a location), there’s time going back and forth on the phone and on e-mail arranging dates, advising what to where, giving direction, blaa-blaa-blaa, that might take another 20 minutes or more, there’s the shoot itself which should last at least 30 minutes if your client is to feel happy about the shoot, and then there’s everything done in post, like file transfer, picking the best shots, doing colour balance, removing dust spots, retouching, etc.  That could easily be 90 minutes.  So all totaled, that’s 2 hours and 40 minutes…and that’s if nothing goes wrong.  That works out to be $37.50/h, or, not a whole hell of a lot!  Factor in your costs for your camera, computer, location, etc., and it’s MUCH less.  You might even be losing money!

So, as I was saying, back in the day, the “real” money would be made in prints because guess what, you keep the negative!.  You could charge $15-$25 for a single photographic print!  Someone needs 10 prints, that’s 150 bucks in your pocket with a cost of only about $10 (including chemicals).  And if that person is really looking for work, they’ll be coming to you ever month or more for more prints!  If you’ve got only 10 regular clients that need prints every month, that could easily be an extra $1500 for  you every month!

But things change.

Now I’m asked for the files so my clients can do what they will with the image.

Recently I was asked (by two separate clients) for digital versions of their letterhead I did for them, so they could fax letters without using their expensive letterhead.  Great idea!  But this poses a huge problem for me because of the industry accepted pricing structure for letterhead design.  That is, generally speaking the price you charge for letterhead is subsidized by the price you charge for printing (the residual).  The result is, the price ceiling the market is willing to bear for design is fairly low.  The market is expecting the price of letterhead in their hand to cost them $x and that the design should be $y/x.  This same formula can be applied to headshots, flyers, ads, etc.

When you’re printing, this traditional pricing formula works beautifully.  Everyone wins.  Your customer has the option of deferring their costs to when the printing is required and the creator is able to accumulate residual payments from work already done.  It’s a bit of a long-term credit situation…creative layaway if you will.  But when we introduce digital files into the picture (no pun intended) the creator gives up all those residuals without gaining appropriate creation fees (because of the already-established low market rate).

So what’s the solution?

In my view, the only fair and viable solution to this problem is via licensing.  A monthly (or yearly) fee to use the product of my creation.  However, this brings up copyright ownership and value vs. price.  But I’ll save those for another post.

So the next time a clients asks for a digital file, consider what you’re giving up and the precedent you’re setting for yourself and your colleagues.

Enjoy!
J R Bernstein

And remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

I think that if you’re going to do something well, you have to immerse yourself in it; be-it fashion photography or basket-weaving.

To be a fashion photographer, not only do you need to know something of photography and lighting, but you also need to be well versed in business, photographic style trends, the technical aspects of digital photography and digital work-flow, and you need to know what’s in style, out of style, and what will be in style down the road.  (Plus about a million other things!)

Enter the RSS feed to the rescue!

There are LOTS of great web-sites and weblogs out there and they each have something useful to offer (the good ones do at least).  The problem has always been keeping up with all your favourite sites and checking them religiously to see if they have been updated.  This usually results in skipping the sites that don’t get updated on a regular basis.  Well, check-no-more my friends!

Through the use of an RSS feed reader, technically called a News Aggregator, (I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 at home and Viigo on my Blackberry), I’m able to have all my latest information sent directly to my Inbox…no searching and surfing required!  Just click the bright orange Subscribe button on the site you’re interested in and that’s it, you’re subscribed!  For more technical information, do a Google Search for RSS+Feed+Reader+Subscribe.

So, with that, here are my three must-read feeds:

• FPBlog
• NOTCouture
• x=blog+stay+informed

Enjoy!
J R Bernstein

And remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!

Lighting Setup

This was a fairly simple 2-light lighting setup, but was able to deliver the impact that I was after. The hardest part of this type of look is getting the light-source relatively large enough to give those smooth gradients and narrow shadows. To achieve this your light needs to be very large or very close to your subject. (Remember, the relative size of your light to your subject is inversely related to its distance from your subject. Further=smaller.) I also made use of some “negative fill” to the right of the frame to make sure those shadows were very dark, creating contrast. Finally, a small amount of light was kicked off a reflector onto the background in order to give it some texture. Visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldwidephotographic/3762213033/ for the full image.

Enjoy!
J R Bernstein

And remember your ABC’s – Always Be Capturing!