Monday, November 30, 2009

Well...

...got to see just how weather-proof the 5D Mark II is: McMurray Girls' Soccer this evening (Varsity, 12-nil, JV, 8-nil, and I'm not making that up) took place under one of Puget Sound's famous drowning mists.

Virtually nothing showed on the doppler radar but the air was simply filled with multitudes of tiny droplets and everything became soaked in minutes.

I didn't have my rain cover 'cause nothing had shown up on the radar as I was leaving home, but I was able to get a towel out of my trunk at half time.

Worst problem was my glasses, which I took off and left in the trunk at the half.

The 5D Mark II functioned flawlessly, as far as I can tell.

I blew it off with a can of compressed air when I got home and chased little droplets out of various crevices and dried it off with a towel.

I think I'll let it sit overnight before I open any of its little hatches...

...or maybe not.

Welcome back...

...to my old (formerly dead) EOS 5D.

UPS just dropped it off from Canon's Factory Service Center; the issue was the EOS 5D "main mirror detachment" problem.

Basically the mirror that flips up out of the way (common to any single lens reflex camera, film or digital) comes unglued and flops around inside the body.

Eighteen days since I shipped it off.

I can see the little brackets that Canon adds to the edges of the mirror (as well as re-gluing it), so some time this week I'll take it out and see if it works.

:-/

Well, bummer...

...seems I will not be photographing this year's Nutcracker 2009 down at the High School.

Another individual has sole rights to all Nutcracker photography this year -- something to do with "business".

Quite disappointing, really...

Next shoot...

McMurray Girls' Soccer, this afternoon down at McMurray.

Been a while since I've been able to shoot McMurray sports, so this will be fun.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Now up...

...the all-new Blue Heron Dance Nutcracker 2008 photos.


All the images are now up on Amazon Web Services S3 and all the html has (of course) been re-written.

1,584 jpeg images including the thumbnails and the full size images, and 813 separate web pages.

Quite a project, but nice to have it done finally :-/ and nice to have it up a week before this year's Blue Heron Dance Nutcracker 2009, at the Vashon High School theater, Friday-Saturday-Sunday, December 4-5-6.

Still don't know which performance I'll be shooting this year...

Friday, November 27, 2009

Nutcracker 2008...

...is coming right along.

Most of the way finished with post-processing The Land of Sweets, and then it's time to do the html and put it all up.

Here's a great one from the Nutcracker Waltz.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

I know!

What with Blue Heron Dance's Nutcracker coming up December 4-5-6, 2009, maybe I should feature photos from Nutcracker 2008!

It'll take a little work but it'll be worth it.

These are shot in the Vashon High School theater; I get a seat in the back row center (or as close to it as the light operators can let me) and shoot down onto the stage from just slightly stage left.

Canon EOS 5D (last year, this year I'll get to use the 5D Mark II); 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens; ISO 1600; white balance "auto"; manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6; camera's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3011BN tripod. Or actually it's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3130 tilt-pan head, and that's mounted on the tripod. :-/

Most of these need some pretty heavy post-processing because the stage lighting, although effective from the standpoint of the human optical system, does not really produce enough lighting for photography.

RAW conversion with an exposure compensation of +1.0 to +2.0 depending on how "dramatic" the lighting for a particular scene was; then I did digital noise reduction on everything just to have everything in one consistent state for final cropping and levels adustment.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Now up...

...VISC Alligators GU-11 soccer, from 11/21/09.

A three-day turnaround. Not bad for having shot 734 original RAW photos.

Whittled that down to 159 tiff's that made the final cut.

That's about 22%.

:-/

Pretty straight forward stuff: EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; image stabilization on, hand-held.

White balance "cloudy"; ISO 1600; aperture priority auto-exposure (Av) at f5.6; most shutter speeds in the range of 1/320th to 1/800th second; one-shot auto focus with a single, center focus point; focus lock.

RAW conversion with Breeze Browser: smart noise reduction "normal"; white balance "cloudy"; sharpness +4 (as shot +3); exposure compensation in the range of -0.4 to +0.4 as needed.

And it didn't rain.

:-)

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Working on...

...a serious web site rebuild.

Basically www.FinchHaven.com started in about 1996 on halcyon.com/~jsage/ (although it wasn't called FinchHaven.com, then) and has been growing (with little-to-no prior planning) ever since.

I registered all the finchhaven.* variants (*.com, *.org, *.net) in 1998.

I've had to change web hosting companies several times because they were cheap and went out of business, once literally in the middle of the night with no prior notice; that time I woke up to find that I had no web site and no email.

So since April of 2004 I've been hosted at Pair.com.

They are not inexpensive, but I've learned the hard way that cheap is cheap for a reason.

Pair.com has excellent customer support the few times I've needed it, and is bullet-proof and rock-steady in terms of uptime.

Last summer I began to work on the one serious downside to Pair.com: being a very prolific photographer, I tend to shoot a lot of events, and take a lot of photographs when I do.

Combine that with the fact that I've never taken anything down that I've put up and I was just about to max-out my current disk space allocation for the hosting plan I had.

The next hosting plan with more disk space was way more money: way more than I could possibly justify spending.

So my brilliant genius son-in-law Bryan suggested that I look into Amazon Web Services, particularly Simple Storage Service, or AWS S3.
"Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers."

Right at the start of last summer I signed up for AWS S3, did a little perl hacking on the user interface aws (also written in perl) from Tim Kay, and now have a series of perl scripts that let me list, put, and delete objects in my "buckets" -- as AWS S3 likes to call them.

This means that from last June onward all my images are stored out in the cloud on Amazon Web Service's S3, while all the html for my web pages is stored on Pair.com.

And this means that I don't have to worry about disk storage space anymore, at all.

Now I'm working on a serious html overhaul, since some of my web pages had grown to over 210k bytes in size, which is embarrassingly obese by web page standards.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Now up...

...VISC Comets GU-12 soccer from 11/14/09.


Pretty straight forward: Canon EOS 5D Mark II with 70-200mm f2.8L zoom and a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm; image stabilization on, hand-held.

White balance "cloudy"; ISO 800; aperture priority auto-exposure (Av) at f5.6, producing typical shutter speeds of 500th second; one-shot center-point focusing with focus lock.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Now up...

...Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer shot at night under the lights at McMurray.

I finally decided to add just a touch of digital noise reduction to the post-processed tiff's using Neat Image.

Neat Image uses either canned or self-created profiles of digital noise for specific camera bodies at specific ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop combinations.

I used a profile for my old 5D at ISO 1600, 200th second at f5.6 because it took just a taste of the very little digital noise that came out of my new 5D Mark II at ISO 6400, 200th at f5.6.

Again, the RAW's received exposure compensation of +1.6 during RAW conversion into tiffs, and then I did a little top-end levels adjustment during cropping.

The resulting photos are consistent, if not a little too soft in some cases.

Working on...

...VISC Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer.

These were shot at night down at McMurray, which does have field lighting, but which does not have any sort of field lighting that a camera can work with, or so you would think.

The lights are only out at the edges of the entire field complex (which has room for one baseball and one softball field, and two soccer fields all at once, and then only on two opposite sides, making for a very hard, directional light that does let people be out there at night, but which provides almost nothing a photographer could really work with.

:-/

First of all, the lights are a really weird color which even the unaided human eye can sense.

I took a wild guess and set my new EOS 5D Mark II's White Balance to "fluorescent", which is 4000K, and which supposedly matches "standard" metal halide lighting.

("Fluorescent" works very well over on the Vashon High School football/soccer/lacrosse field for night sports photography).

Then I needed to deal with the fact that there's simply not much light out there, no matter what it's color. The 5D Mark II was set at ISO 6400 (!), manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6,

Right away during RAW conversion "fluorescent" or 4000K was clearly too yellow, although at that the colors were still off, anyway.

So I did a little tinkering and settled on a manual Color Temperature setting of 3500K as being "good enough" for RAW conversion.

To deal with the lack of light I settled on doing an Exposure Compensation of +1.6 and the resulting photos were at least acceptable to look at and see if there was any soccer action worthy of having been photographed...

So here's a small (600 pixel by 400 pixel at 180ppi jpeg, with no digital noise reduction applied whatsoever:



Remember, folks, this was shot at ISO 6400!

The EOS 5D Mark II is becoming more impressive the more I use it!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Well, that's interesting...

Canon Service Center (as I guess it's supposed to be called) just called (my old 5D died with a "main mirror detachment issue" -- which they're fixing for free) and said that, since my old 5D has over 85,000 (!) shots on it, would I like to replace the shutter and mirror box while it was in for service anyway, which they recommend doing at about 100.000 "clicks" as she called them.

I said "How much?"

She said "About $600.00."

I said "I'll pass..."

Since I've just bought my new 5D Mark II, the old 5D is going to become a backup body/second-lens-mounted body, and I'm not going to sweat 15,000 more shots before it might need to be replaced outright.

Hey! Maybe then I'll get the EOS 1D Mark IV I'm lusting after...

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Well...

...just shot VISC Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer down at McMurray, at night, and there's really no light to speak of as far as cameras go.

'course there are field lights, but the human optic system does wonders with what a camera just laughs at.

So, ISO 6400, manual exposure (M) at 200th second at f5.6.

We'll see tomorrow when I get the RAW files burned to DVD and moved off to a Window$ box to convert and post-process.

First impression: there actually are some images that I'll be able to work with.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Wow!

Just got my first look at the Turkey Trot photos, shot at ISO 3200, and it is absolutely astonishing how noise-free these photos are.

For all practical purposes, viewed at 100% into the embedded jpeg in an unconverted RAW 3861x2574 image, 250th second at f5.6, there is simply nothing that I would call "grain" or "noise".

Nothing.

Here's a random crop into the middle of one random photo, shot at ISO 3200, that's been converted straight-up as shot: no sharpening, no noise reduction, no exposure compensation, just a 100%, 567 pixel by 318 pixel crop right out of the resulting 3861x2574 180ppi tiff, saved as a jpeg, quality level 10:



And for some sort of reference, here's the full size uncropped tiff, just saved as an 800 pixel by 533 pixel jpeg at 180ppi and quality 10:



Can't wait to do the Nutcracker in the Vashon High School Theater in about four weeks!

Just shot...

...Turkey Trot 2009 down at Chautauqua in a pouring rain.

Definitely Kata rain cover time :-/

I'll be very interested to get a look at these photos: they are the first shot I've with the new 5D Mark II at ISO 3200.

Heavy cloud cover, so ISO 3200 and Aperture priority exposure of f5.6 produced (for those I noticed) shutter speeds around 250th to 320th second.

Shooting in the rain with center-point focus and focus lock means I look through all the raindrops on my glasses, look through all the rain drops on the Kata rain cover, wait for the red square to light up, and bang.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

For the fun of it...

...I just re-did my Vashon Island Soccer Club home page, and re-emphasized some 2005 gameday photos I took.

Check 'em out and see if you recognize anyone!

Very first impressions:

The EOS 5D Mark II seems to produce a softer image than the original 5D, very subjectively.

This would be for the soccer photos shot yesterday under very flat light because of the heavy cloud cover.

Also (of course, having to always fiddle with something...) I approached focusing differently from how I've set it up in the past, and that may have had something to do with it

I'm dialing-in a little more sharpness than I previously have during RAW conversion, that being turning it up from "3 As-shot" to 4 of 7...

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Just shot...

About (I'm not making this up) 1,700 photos at two VISC soccer games today: Comets GU-12, and Pirates FC GU-11.

The deal is that I try to get some shots of *everyone* -- not just the stars, and not just the star moments.

So I take lots of photos.

Also I wanted a lot of photos to look at to see how the new EOS 5D Mark II body is doing.

70-200mm f2.8 zoom with the 1.4x extender, for an effective focal length of 98-280mm.

ISO 800 early on, then to ISO 1600 as some heavier cloud cover came in. White balance "Cloudy". Aperture priority exposure at f5.6, most shutter speeds (that I noticed) > 500th second.

Using center-point auto-focus, AI Focus, with the Auto-Focus Stop button and the AE/FE buttons swapped at C-Fv IV-2, and thus working as a Focus Lock/Stop.

Love the BG-E6 Battery Grip as it lets me quickly roll the camera over to Portrait when the soccer players get right up on me at the side lines, and then quickly roll the camera back over to landscape as they pass by.

Oh yeah: the Comets GU-12 team won 3-nil, and the Pirates FC GU-11 team won by either 3- or 4-nil!

Friday, November 13, 2009

Now up...

Rockbusters Wrestlers 2009, both the wrestler and the team photos..


These came out pretty well, all things considered, that being that they're shot under duress.

Duress being that the coaches want to get this over with as quickly as possible, that I'm working in a small space with 50+ 6- to 11-year-old wrestlers, that there's only enough room for one strobe, and that the floors and lower walls are dark green or a kind of yellow-gold, while the upper walls and the ceilings are yellow-gold (see the Team photos to see what I mean) and the existing lighting are fluorescents that are about nine feet overhead.

Shot with my new EOS 5D Mark II; ISO 200; white balance 5600K to match the single Alien Bees AB800 strobe that was fired into a 60" softbox mounted on a light stand at about chest height; manual exposure at a 60th at f8.0; the strobe is just off my right shoulder and about 10 feet from the subjects for the wrestler shots, and dead-center and back about 18-20 feet for the team shots.

For the wrestler shots the softbox was turned to portrait; for the team shots the softbox was rotated over to landscape and aimed somewhat up at the ceiling.


Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Just shot...

...Rockbusters Wrestlers with the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II body, and my 24-70mm f2.8L zoom lens.

I'll be looking at the photos in detail tomorrow, but the preview on the Mk II's wider 3.0"/920,000 pixel lcd screen is stunning, to say the least.

The histogram is in color (and can show RGB levels, as well as luminance) and is bright, sharp and clear. Menu-selectable options add display of blown-out highlights, as well as whether the histogram initially shows luminance or RGB levels.

I was using the 5D Mk II with a PocketWizard II Plus wireless transmitter to a second PocketWizard firing a single Alien Bee AB800, which fired into a 60" softbox mounted about chest high on a single light stand.

The single 60" softbox was off my right shoulder, turned to portrait and about 10 feet from the subject, and gave a reasonable amount of relatively soft, well-place light, certainly a big step over on-camera flash (which sucks) but not as good as being able to use two softboxes would have been.

Which would have been impossible: space is a little limited in the wrestling room at the High School to say the least, not to mention that there's roughly 50 little wresters running around at full speed doing warm-ups before their evening's practice, and that I needed to occupy as little of the very tight space as I could.

To do the team shots, I moved the AB800 and the 60" soft box back about 18-20 feet from one wall, turned the softbox itself to landscape and aimed it slightly up at the ceiling, shot from just under its lower left corner, and lit the entire team pretty sucessfully.

We'll see more tomorrow...

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Now up...

Halloween on Vashon Island, 2009



The definitive Halloween celebration on Vashon Island is up in town from about 4:00 pm until late (being maybe 7:30 or 8:00 pm, when we roll up the sidewalks).

The Vashon Island Highway is closed through the center of town, and everybody and anybody comes up town to Trick or Treat at all the stores.

Lots of little kids, Chautauqua buddies, McMurray buddies, High School buddies.

It's very cool.

I just got back...

...from Glazer's Cameras in Seattle, and am now the proud owner of a brand new Canon EOS 5D Mark II, body only.

Sure wasn't planning on having to spend this sort of money right now, and I'm sure I'll feel OK about it once I get past my current state of shock.

:-/

And once my original 5D is fixed I'll have a second/backup body, which will be a Good Thing(tm).

Monday, November 9, 2009

Well, the good news is...

...this, I guess.

"Thank you for contacting Canon product support. We value you as a Canon customer and appreciate the opportunity to assist you. We are sorry to hear that the mirror has fallen out of your EOS 5D.

It has come to our attention that in rare instances the main mirror of some EOS 5D Digital SLR cameras may detach due to deterioration in the strength of the adhesive. As a result, Canon USA will repair and reinforce the mirror portion of affected EOS 5D cameras free of charge.

Canon will also cover the cost of shipping and handling in connection with this repair. ..."

They're sorry.

Yeah, not so sorry as me..

Holy Cr*pola, Batman...

...I just had this happen to me tonight at the PTSA-sponsored basketball game down at the High School:

Service Notice: EOS 5D: Main Mirror Detachment

Apparently (well, no: it's obvious) the main mirror that displays the image in the viewfinder of an SLR (and DSLR) camera comes loose from its mount in a Canon EOS 5D, albeit "rarely".

"Phenomenon
The main mirror of the camera detaches and images cannot be viewed through the viewfinder."

I just love the understated quality of *that* statement.

It makes no mention of the fact that the mirror's effectively flopping around loose inside the camera body...

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Now up...

VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA, and Senior's Night 2009:


After re-RAW converting all the second half photos (one of them, above) to a white balance of "Fluorescent" rather than "Auto-As shot" the results are much improved in that they're consistent if not 100% "correct".

I think that if the photos had been originally shot with one specific white balance the outcome would be pretty much spot-on.

EOS 5D; 70-200mm f2.8L with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm; shot at 98mm; White Balance Auto-As shot; Manual exposure 200th at f8.0;

RAW conversion: white balance "fluorescent"; exposure compesation +2; PS levels mid 1.1 high 180-200; fill flash 3 lighter, 35 saturation; Neat Image digital noise reduction 5D @ 1600 ISO 200th f5.6; remove only half of noise

Saturday, November 7, 2009

White balance redux...

Just decided to re-RAW convert all the second half VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA photos: kept coming across a few photos where the white balance as first RAW converted (from "as shot Auto White Balance") was so weird that the color rendition was just coming outer space.

:-/

The end product should be much improved.

Girls' Soccer Senior's Night 2009 is up at www.finchhaven.com/vhs/ ... /Girls_Soccer_v_CWA_and_Seniors_Night_102709/Seniors_Night

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Now up...

Volleyball v Orting and Senior's Night, 2009.

Here's Rachel with another block:


Canon EOS 5D, 70-200mm f2.8L zoom at 70mm; ISO 1600; "fluorescent" pre-set white balance, Available light; Manual exposure, 200th at f8.0; Auto-focus, center point spot with focus lock.

Heavily post-processed: +2 exposure compensation at RAW conversion; Levels: mid 1.1, high 180-200; Fill Flash +3 and Saturation 35; Neat Image noise reduction at EOS 5d, ISO 1600, "remove half of noise"

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Note to self:

Volleyball has *got* to be the hardest sport to photograph.

When you consider that most points are scored in something like seven to eight seconds, that there's six players confined to an area about one-third the side of a basketball court, and that from just about any angle you're either shooting at the players' backs or shooting through the opponents to get to the players' faces, its a wonder that I get anything at all.

And don't get me started about focusing. Center-point auto-focus and focus lock, or manual focus on a generic distance and hope for the best? Neither one works very well.

And then we have the lighting in the Vashon High School gym, which is (let me be charitable, here) horrible.

So basically it's shooting at ISO 1600, manual at 200th, f5.6, and hope I can pull up some kind of an image with exposure compensation during post-processing.

And then after something's light enough to see what I got, maybe it'll be in focus.

Working on...

Putting up Vashon Island Soccer Club GU13 Phoenix and GU12 Riptides

Monday, November 2, 2009

Working on...

Halloween up town in Vashon last Saturday. Got some great shots as the sun went down. EOS 5D; 28-70mm f2.8L zoom at 38mm; ISO 400; Manual exposure: 200th at f5.6; Speedlight 550EX flash on ETTL as fill.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Most Recent...

Halloween up town. Here's UMO at the stoplight working the crowd as a young storyteller finishes her "scary joke":



EOS 5D, 24-70mm f2.8L at 70mm; ISO 800; 200th at f5.6; 550EX Speedlight on Manual. 1/2 power.