FinchHaven

mkay...

2011-02-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

...seems all was not as simple as I first thought.

Came up with over 1,100 "Missing Photos" in each of my two now-synchronized catalogs.

erk...

But, Lightroom to the rescue.

Select a specific missing photo (part of the beauty of Lightroom is that, even though it knows when a photo's gone missing it can still show you what it knew about it before it vanished) in Grid mode of the Library module, and click on the "Missing Photo" icon in the upper-right corner.

Lightroom attempts to give you a best-guess as to where it was, to navigate from.

*If* you know the photo is really still around, navigate to the correct folder and select the specific file.

Leave "Find nearby photos?" selected.

Click OK.

Lightroom recovers the missing photos!

In the Library module, under "Catalog" select "All photos" and select Library > Find missing photos.

Again, select one, click "Missing" icon, find, find nearby.

Find the photos, Spot! Good dog.

Repeat as needed, or wade through all the missing photos all at once.

Coolness...

And what had happened to the "Missing" photos in the first place?

I had renamed a few directories on my file server, which Lightroom had no way of knowing about.

Takeaway: only rename source directories on the file server from within Lightroom, under the "Folders" panel in the Library module.

duh...

Whew That was really...

2011-02-11T10:42:00.001-08:00

...scary.

Any first-time experiment that involves *really* important stuff (my photos) and new software (Adobe Lightroom) and the primary index file of a large and important database (Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat) has got to be scary.

The primary problem is that I have two essentially identical shiny-new Win 7 boxes to use for photo post-processing.

Each has its own copy of Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5.

The core idea here is that I can be working on one project, move to the other box when something on the first is taking time (i.e. printing) and keep right on working -- but on a separate project.

Or just switch back and forth between two projects: work for a half hour on wrestling, work for a half hour on basketball, lather-rinse-repeat.

Or wanting to print photos from one project simultaneously on both boxes when the catalog's only on one.

The problem is that over time I get two entirely different catalogs of photos on each box.

Which at the very least is a PITA trying to remember what's where.

So, search Lightroom Help for "combine catalog" or "merge catalog" or variants, only to finally discover that what I want to do is "Import from catalog".

Which is, of course, right there on the File menu in the first place, but whatever...

Select "Import from catalog" and navigate to the *.lrcat file on the other box over the network, select it, and "OK".

"Check All".

"Add new photos to catalog without moving" i.e. keep them out on the file server.

Select "Replace metadata, Develop settings and negative files" and "Preserve Old Settings As A Virtual Copy".

Click "Import".

Hold breath.

And it works -- although it takes a while, given that I've got over 6,500 photos that have been imported.

And what I get is identical catalogs on both computers, with photos in an equivalent state on both boxes.

Of course the two catalogs will diverge as I work separately on each box, but it's nice to know that I can synchronize them pretty painlessly -- and quickly, having done the heavy lifting once the first time.

Further thoughts about Adobe Lightroom...

2011-01-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

...while I'm waiting for the printer to finish.

So I'm printing an order, one which in the past would have been rather a PITA because it involves six different photos in four different formats or aspect ratios.

One image is to be done as an 8x10" portrait, a 5x7" portrait, and at 1.9x2.8" on a 4x6" sheet -- this to fit a custom commemorative frame from the 2010 Father-Daughter Dance.

The first two would be rather straight forward: load the original image, compose and finalize the crop, load the paper, do the page setup, do the print setup, print it.

But switching between the two crops always brought up a "Save the Changes?" dialog, and it was here I had to pay attention, because although many times I want to save changes, here I don't because all I'm doing is sending out a transient version to the printer.

But more than once I'd hit <Enter> reflexively, only to go "Oh cr*p..." because, no, I really didn't want to save that specific crop: I'd just over-written the original which is Not a Good Thing(tm).

But with Lightroom, there's no concept of "Save" or "Save as" at all - in fact there isn't even such a thing on any menu.

Which takes some getting used to.

Again, what Lightroom does is all "virtual" -- or, as I'd rather think of it, write to a database that records a list of state changes for a given image.

So there's no risk of saving some intermediate format of an image, because all I'd done was work through some new state changes, print that, and *poof* none of it really exists anywhere except the final print, and even those state changes can go away as soon as I need to edit the image a little.

Like print a 4x6" right after I've printed an 8x10".

Without having to pay a lot of attention to what I'm doing, because I'm probably doing something else on the other computer at the same time...

Very cool!

OK: Adobe Bridge...

2011-01-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

...is exactly what I've been looking for to replace BreezeBrowser Pro and do all the front-end file management stuff before I even start into Adobe Lightroom.

I'm able to sit on one (or two, although not both at once) of my new Win 7 boxes and look at Canon RAW files that are on my file server, over my network.

I can move, delete, and re-name files at will.

And all much, much faster than I'd been able to do it on the file server box itself, which is running Ubuntu 10.10 and where I have to use gthumb to view files in the Canon RAW format via dcraw.

Totally cool!

OK: Adobe Lightroom...

2010-12-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

...is simply an extraordinary piece of software on any number of levels: possibly more so than any other software I've purchased in a long time.

(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)

Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.

1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.

2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.

So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.

Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.

Lightroom is amazing.

Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.

The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.

I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.

These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...

Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.

Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.

When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.

Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.

All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.

Only then does some actual new image come into existence.

And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.

Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.

More later...

Tried something a little...

2010-10-10T12:21:00.001-07:00

...different for the Vashon High School Cross Country meet on Thursday, October 7, 2010.

I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).

The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.

I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.

Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.

Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.

I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.

I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).

In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.

All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

There is an immediate answer...

2010-10-04T12:16:00.001-07:00

...to the weird lighting in the Vashon High School gym issue.

That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.

Consider the following, as-shot:

ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.

Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.

(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).

Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:

except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.

So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.

We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.

Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.

Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.

Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".

Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.

Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.

The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.

(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).

Here's the finished product:

So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.

And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.

The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.

Well, that may have answered...

2010-09-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

...that question.

The question being, why the hell do photos shot in the Vashon High School gym come out with such wildly different color renditions between two photos shot within fractions of a second from one another?

Example #1 (you'll need to click on the image to see the full details);

And Example #2:

Obviously these two photos were shot within a fraction of a second from one another.

And yes, (Spoiler Alert!) they were shot on Auto White Balance, which may turn out to be half the problem.

But only half.

So while the color cast in photo Number One looks pretty much OK, Number Two (particularly look at the color of the back wall) has a distinctly orangey-pinky cast to it.

W, as they say, TF?

I haven't moved; the gym hasn't moved; so why the hell is the color cast so different (and this is a relatively mild example) between the two photos?

Now, it's a standing joke that the halide lights in the Vashon High School gym are appallingly bad anyway: they're literally different colors, such that you can stand out on the gym floor and almost see no two light of the same visible color.

This is due to age and maintenance, I'd bet: when the individual bulbs have needed replacement I'm sure that no thought whatsoever was given to buying a metal-halide bulb identical to those already installed. Let's get the cheapest, and be done with it.

Add in age (halide lights change color as they get older) and you've got lighting that pretty much sucks.

But why would two photos shot within moments of one another, pointed at identical parts of the gym, have such different color casts?

Turns out the real culprit is alternating current, and the way halide (and fluourescent) lights work.

Halide (and fluorescent) lights are actually cycling on and off at 120 hertz or 120 times per second -- at least those with older non-electronic ballasts -- which I'm sure is what the VHS gym lights are.

Way too fast for the human optic system to see, but not too fast for a camera taking ten shots per second at an exposure of 250th second per.

So apparently what I'm catching here is the actual change in light output/color output of the lights as they cycle on and off at 120 hz.

OK: fine.

What to do about it?

Slowing the shutter speed down to, say, a 60th or a 30th of a second might do it, but that's not going to work for shooting sports.

So I think the strategy is to register a Custom White Balance in my EOS 1D Mark IV and 5D Mark II, and not have the camera think that it's doing it correctly when it's looking at light that's constantly flickering and thinking it's got a valid reading for Auto White Balance.

During RAW conversion and post-processing I just tell BreezeBrowser "This is what color the light is, period" instead of whatever the camera thought it was at the instant a particular photo was shot.

I think.

At least that's the Plan of the Moment(tm).

File and workflow management...

2010-09-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

...have become the major new issues now that I'm shooting with my new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, and in fact for major sports events, shooting with both the 1D M4 and with my EOS 5D Mark II as well.

For field sports the 1D M4 has the 70-200mm f2.8.L zoom, often with the Extender EF 1.4 II for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm, while the 5D M2 has the 24-70mm f2.8L zoom for closeups.

Setups for both cameras is as identical as I can get it regarding ISO, White Balance, Exposure Mode, Metering Mode, and Focusing Mode and focus point.

Since I'm shooting in Continuous Shooting mode while the game is underway the 1D M4 is taking something less than 10 shots per second, while the 5D M4 is taking something less than 4 per second.

I'm shooting in M-RAW on the 1D M4 which is spec'ed at "9.0 mB 3672x2448" and in S-RAW-1 on the 5D M4, which is spec'ed at "9.9 mB 3861x2574".

Despite the fact that Canon says both of these produce files roughly in the 9.0-10.0 mB range, most of the RAW files I get seem to end up somewhere north of 15 mB each.

Go figure.

So I shot 2,341 photos in a Saturday of Vashon Island Soccer Club games.

(As a matter of policy I shoot *everyone* -- not just the "star" players -- on any team I photograph).

That comes out to 38.26 gB (that's gigabytes, folks) of photos as they came off the Compact Flash cards and onto a hard drive.

So my old method:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box,
2) burn to DVD,
3) copy off the DVD onto the hard drive on one of the two Win XP boxes I use for post-processing,
4) post-process on the Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages back on the Ubuntu Linux box that contains the local copy of my web site,
6) archive the DVD

has become:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box I'm now using as a file server,
2) review and tag acceptable RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
3) move the tagged files to a new directory on the file server,
4) post-process the tagged RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages on the Linux box that houses my web site,
6) delete unused RAW files that never made the cut, and
7) burn the tagged RAW files and the tiffs produced by post-processing onto a DVD for off-line archiving

It's taken a little thinking and fiddling to get this down and streamlined, but so far it seems to be working.

And it may be more separate steps, listed out like this, but in actual practice doing RAW conversion and post-processing using two instances of BreezeBrowser running on each of two Win XP boxes means I'm really able to keep things moving.

And one major advantage is that I'm no longer even keeping photos that never make the cut, which I did in the old method.

Although I'm paying only about $0.66 per DVD/c-shell case for storage, I don't need to keep something I've only looked at once and will never look at again...

Well, I've really...

2010-08-26T08:32:00.000-07:00

...gone and done it now.

Ordered and received a new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.

"Wow! You must be selling a lot of photos to be able to afford something like that!"

uhh.. no.

Or, well, business is OK, particularly considering the economy, but basically I have no hope whatsoever that the 1DM4 will ever pay for itself -- maybe -- I just hope I can do OK enough to keep on top of the credit card payments.

:-/

What has happened is that since I quit working for the Vashon School District last October and got into photography full-time I've been shooting a lot of sports, and shooting more and more in Continuous Shooting (oldtimers would call it "motor-drive") Drive Mode.

Shot a *lot* of basketball, lacrosse, baseball and soccer last winter and spring.

And what I kept seeing over and over again is, in it's simplest, the fact that four frames per second* (which is what my EOS 5D Mark II can do) is just not fast enough to shoot sports.

I mean, you get good photos, but when I'm doing RAW conversion I keep seeing that the one or two shots that I might have got in between the ones I *did* get would have been the ones I really wanted.

Not the shooter's arm coming up for the shot, or the basketball gone and on it's way to the basket, but the one or two shots where the ball is just coming off the shooter's fingertips.

Not the lacrosse stick back over the shoulder, or the lacrosse stick out at full extension toward the goal, but the one or two shots where the lacrosse ball is just coming out of the pouch.

Not the soccer ball several feet up over the player's head, but the one or two shots where the soccer ball is sitting right on his forehead as the player heads the ball.

You get the idea.

Now, granted that motor-drive mode is just a crap-shoot anyway: you press the shutter, the camera starts recording images at a (relatively) set interval, and hopefully one or two of them will be taken at The Moment(tm).

You'd think that four frames per second would be enough, but sports is really fast.

So after having spent the winter and spring constantly fretting about the shots I *should* have gotten but didn't, I finally decided to jump into the issue with both feet.

So, we'll soon see: fall sports (Vashon High School football, girls' soccer, volleyball, boys' tennis) starts in about two weeks.

Also to be seen: whether or not Canon has solved the significant AI Servo auto-focus issues that plagued the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

Stay tuned! It should be an interesting fall...

* All references to frames per second for the 5D Mk II and the 1D Mk IV are using a UDMA 6 Compact Flash card -- Sandisk "Extreme Pro" 16GB compact flash cards, in fact

Seems I should have...

2010-08-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

...done more night photography at the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival this year.

These are from Friday night at Ober Park, the Tom Bean Blues band.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; Auto-focus one shot; single-center focus point; ISO 6400; Aperture Value exposure; f3.2 at 200th second; Metering Mode center-weighted average; Auto white balance as shot, but RAW conversion with Tungsten white balance.

Version 1.6.2 of Versus TV's...

2010-07-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

..."Official Tour de France iPhone Application" was released overnight before Stage 12.

All it's done is to reformat Tracking -> Breakaways from a map to a list.

None of the other bugs and deficiences I've discussed, below, have been touched.

And -- wait for it! -- the Breakaways "upgrade" is seriously b0rked.

(Is that the sound of me *not* being surprised?)

Basically, as the Peleton advances through the Stage, the Breakaways list never updates -- which is pretty much the only reason you'd have to ever look at such a thing.

Here's some iPhone screenshots (hold down Home and Lock simultaneously) of the last minutes of Stage 12:

Note that I'm not saying that *this* screenshot is correct: in fact it's not correct: it's just the first screenshot I saved when I thought I wanted to start documenting what was going on.

What is *relatively* correct (like being kinda pregnant?) here is that we're on Stage 12, we're probably 200 of 209 kilometers into the stage, and the total elapsed on-course time is probably 4:46:49 - four hours, forty-six minutes, forty-nine seconds into the Stage.

(The official time for the entire Stage 12 was 4:58:46 - so here we're about 12 minutes from the end).

Note the gaps (which are not, at this point, accurate): the Peleton is +02:39 back of the lead breakaway, Breakaway 3 is +01:29 back, Breakaway 2 is +00:35 back of the leading pack of four riders.

Now we're at 4:57:53 -- less than one minute to go!

What's wrong with this picture is that Break 2 is still +00:35 back, and the front breakaway still contains the same four riders.

None of that is true in the least.

Now we're at 5:00:36 into Stage 12 -- the Stage is over, and we've clearly got a winner, second, and third places.

What's wrong with this picture is that Break 3 is still +0:45 back even though there was no such thing at this point.

And even more wrong than that is poor Alberto Contador: here he's shown being back in the Peleton -- which is still mysteriously +02:39 back -- alongside Andy Schleck, except that Alberto Contador finished second overall for Stage 12 at +00:00 -- tied with Oliver Rodriquez, the Stage winner.

Andy Schleck? He actually finished the stage +00:10 back, in fourth.

Even more bizarre is that Mark Cavendish is shown *ahead* of both Contador and Schleck in Breakway 3 -- even though the Stage 12 results show him 159th at +12:39 behind for the Stage.

Finally, just for some sort of good measure, here's the top of the Breakaways screen at 5:01:05:

So the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" shows we're at almost three minutes after the end of Stage 12 and the Breakaways screen is for all practical purposes showing exactly what it did almost 15 minutes earlier.

What's the point of my bothering about this?

The point is that Versus TV (have I said this before?) and Participant Sports rushed out an iPhone app for the 2010 Tour de France that was defective to begin with, wildly overpriced, and essentially without any user support whatsoever, this despite its Facebook page, which even at this very moment the Apple App Store is identifying as "Official Tour de France LIVE Support"!

Thanks to Apple's No Refund policy on App Store purchases, all the buyers are essentially screwed.

And despite the fact that I have repeatedly posted Problem reports out of my iPhone:

The version 1.6.2 "upgrade" is broken.

The only thing this "upgrade" does is reformat Tracking -> Breakaways into a list -- that never updates.

I took extensive screenshots at the Stage 12 end to permanently document this continuing fraud.

See my latest post in Discussion forum on app's "Official" Facebook page.

Since Apple makes money on every sale of this fraudulent app it's very clear why you folks are doing nothing about this ongoing travesty.

Fair notice: screenshots and an entire archive of the Facebook pages are being kept for future reference.

not only have I heard nothing from Apple, but I'm sure I never will.

Remember: Apple's No Refund policy means it gets to keep every penny *it* rips-off from the chumps who bought this POS, as does Versus TV and Participant Sports.

Versus TV's Tour de France...

2010-07-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

...iPhone app, after Stage 9, with the Tour de France now 45% over.

Still at ver 1.6.1 which is now five days old.

No responses to any purchaser posts on either the Wall or in the Discussion Forums (nor in fact any participation of any kind) at Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Facebook page in five days.

Just today Versus TV cut the price of it's iPhone app to $10

Meaning (to me, anyway): "screw the early adopters and everyone we've duped so far", and monetize the hell out of the thing before time runs out completely.

This all the while App Store ratings continue to fall: now down to 2.5 stars in 159 ratings of the current version, and 2.5 stars in 429 ratings of all versions.

Via my iPhone, I've again submitted a Problem report through the app's App Store page:

The price cut to $10 proves how relentlessly Versus TV intends to monetize an app that never should have made it out of beta - let alone cost $15 - or now $10

There has been no support (or even participation) on this app's Facebook page from anyone associated with either Versus TV or Participant Sports in five days.

Every single bug and flaw found in the earliest version continues in the "current" 1.6.1 version - which is five days old.

It's clear that Versus TV intends to grab every last dime out of this app - all the while the app's ratings continue to drop - with the fully-complicit cooperation of Apple and the iTunes App Store.

I have been keeping copies of every Problem report I have submitted and have received no response whatsoever.

The courtesy of a reply would be appreciated.

I have yet to hear anything from Versus TV, Participant Sports, or Apple about any of this.

Just wait until they try this again next year!

;-/

The degree of duplicity...

2010-07-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

...and complicity in the fraud that is Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" is pretty stunning.

I jumped right in with both feet and purchased the $15 version about a week before the Tour de France was to start.

Right up front I admitted to myself that there was a definite risk here, but Versus TV's coverage of the TDF has always been superlative, so for some completely bizarre reason I thought that level of quality might translate over into an iPhone app.

Ha! Fool me once...

(Realize that I have bought other expensive sports apps: at $32 Soft Pauer's Formula One "F1 2010 Timing App Championship Version" is twice as expensive as the TDF app, but it's an absolute gem, and has been well worth every penny. Of course, Soft Pauer is a software developer, unlike the "developer" of Versus' TDF app).

Anyway...

I've just downloaded, sync'ed and rebooted my iPhone 3G S, iOS 4.0 with version 1.6.1 of the pay version (there's a free version also, ver 1.6.1, that's nothing but but a platform for incessant nags that try to coerce you to upgrade to the pay version).

So, with the Tour de France 30% over, and with it ending in less than 3 weeks, the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application", at version 1.6.1, still has every single one of the bugs and flaws that it had in it a week ago.

Meanwhile, yesterday at the Apple App Store, Versus TV's "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" was rated as the 6th highest-grossing pay iPhone app!

On the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Facebook page what was a pretty steady downpour of critical comments on either the Wall or in the Discussions forums has now stopped almost entirely.

People have just given up.

Like all good American consumerist sheeple, we've learned to buy what's presented to us, not to expect much in terms of value, and certainly not to expect anything even vaguely approaching customer support.

As it is, the "developer" of the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" Participant Sports is not a software developer at all but rather a marketing company:

We provide a full services program that has resulted in enormous success for our clients in developing their property for sponsors, engaging and closing multi-year sponsorship agreements (over $50M in contract value since 2008), and then using online and mobile technology to engage the participants of the sports and activate the sponsorship relationship.

And the "support" from either Versus TV or Participant Sports has ranged from non-existent to utterly laughable.

Get this:

Official Tour de France iPhone Application Tip #1: If you aren't hearing audio on your video stream, your phone is probably in vibrate. You need to turn vibrate off.

Oh. I see. We've had our phones on vibrate all this time but have just been too stupid to notice! That explains everything!

But the larger issue beyond all this is just how something as dreadful as this app (despite 3 new versions, at least that I'm aware of)

1) ever got approved in the first place,

2) remains on sale despite all its obvious problems, and

3) how it got|gets such high ratings (currently 3 stars - 113 ratings for the "current version" - whatever that is)

Apple's iStore app review process is legendary: it takes weeks, and allegedly Apple scrutinizes all sorts of picky issues before it anoints an application as being worthy of the Apple App Store crown.

So how the hell did this particular POS *ever* get approved?

Probably because it was being pushed by a fourth- or fifth-tier cable sports network, Versus TV, who went on about having to make a deadline because the Tour starts, runs, and then is over and done with forever.

But it's exactly this short shelf-life that makes this all such a travesty: the app's purchasers are being unknowingly dragooned into beta-testing an app that should have never been put up for sale in the first place, all the while the useful lifespan of what they've put out $15 for is dropping by the day.

I've sent in detailed "Report a Problem" narratives from the App Store via my iPhone on an-almost-daily basis, listing specific, repeatable bugs and deficiencies in the "Official Tour de France iPhone Application" and I have yet to receive any response -- that is to say no response whatsoever -- from whomever it is that gets these "Problem" reports. I'm betting that Apple just shit-cans them.

This farce also highlights the completely bogus nature of Apple's App Store ratings process: conservatively, 50% of the ratings are by App Store Fanbois who get off on putting on an app and immediately rushing back to the App Store to post a rave review.

Ratings like "Great app!" "Best app ever!" "I love this app!" sum up the depth and detail of many of the "ratings".

If you're an App Store Fanboi, fifteen seconds of fame times [some really large number] is pretty gratifying.

Probably better than sex, to an Apple App Store Fanboi.

But it doesn't tell anyone anything really useful about how good (or bad) a particular app really is.

Particularly one that costs $15.

Particularly one that costs $15 and that should have never made it out of beta.

Particularly one that costs $15, that should have never made it out of beta, and that will be obsolete on July 26.

I've been involved...

2010-07-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

...in quite a quibble with Versus TV about the quality of its $15 iPhone Tour de France app.

The app is breathtakingly lousy, even for free.

But they're charging $15 (non-refundable, of course, at the Apple App Store) and at that price it's consumer fraud at the least.

A few examples follow:

1) at "Reports -> Photos" for example there is a screen of thumbnails of photos that probably are of the TDF, but they're unidentified and have no captions. Even more incredible is that the individual photos are static: you can't swipe left or right to go to the next photo. You have to go back out to the thumbnails, remember where you were, and select the next photo that way. But there's no captions or context or anything: they're just random photos

2) at "Reports -> Twitter" the tweets are all static text, so that hashtags or URLs in the tweet are completely useless. Even more astonishing is the fact that the text of the tweets is completely static also: you can't even Select -> Copy -> Paste anything, so again the hashtags and URLs are worthless

3) at "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" the current position of the peleton in the day's stage is in real time, whereas Versus TV's "live" (I get up at 5:30 am PDT to watch it) broadcast is wildly time-shifted to fit in endless ads and personal-interest puff-pieces such that the "live" Versus broadcast never matches up with the location of the peleton as its shown on Versus' $15 iPhone app

So I guess this "feature" is for people who are at work not working but trying to follow the TDF...

4) the "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" displays a white-screen-of-death and locks up if you rotate the iPhone over to landscape mode

5) at "Standings -> Stage results" (or any other subsection of Standings) the data apparently has to re-load itself off Versus' servers each time you access a specific screen - and half the time no data ever loads

6) and then there's just the garden-variety random crashes, where the app suddenly collapses under its own weight and drops me out to a random home screen.

Even *that* happens all-too-frequently for a beta app, let alone an app that's gone through Apple's allegedly-rigorous Apple Store iPhone App Approval Process(tm), let alone an App Store app that's free, let alone an App Store app that costs $15 (that's "fifteen") (did I say non-refundable?) dollars...

Finally, today (Tuesday July 6) shortly after the end of Stage 3, the cake was taken by the fact that suddenly "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" was showing the peleton well out on Stage 4:

What's wrong with this picture, you might well ask.

Well, Stage 4 doesn't even start until tomorrow, Wednesday July 7.

I wonder if Versus TV's going to bill me for another $15 now that they've added time travel to their #fail crappy iPhone app...

p.s. in all this time I've never received any response whatsoever from @VersusTV on Twitter or on their Facebook page, this despite having made dozens of tweets about their POS...

RAW Conversion: what's in a histogram?

2010-04-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

I shoot Canon RAW exclusively. Last time I directly shot any jpegs it was by mistake, and it was a total disaster -- or almost.

But this means that the RAW files need to be converted into something that's human-decypherable: RAW files in-and-of themselves are inherently non-viewable without some sort of intermediate translation applied.

For RAW conversion I use Breeze System's BreezeBrowser Pro: I'm not professional enough to be able to afford the Adobe Tax(tm).

The single element I work with most frequently (which is to say, on every single photo) during RAW conversion is Exposure Compensation -- and this is adjusted by refering to the histogram for each photo before I convert it.

Here's three micro-adjustments made to one photo before conversion (clicky):

The range of Exposure Compensation adjustments ranges from -1.3 Ev to -1.5 Ev in .1 Ev steps.

Notice that the histogram is greatly similar across all three adjustments, but with a slight and significant difference.

Essentially the histogram represents a graph depicting 255 steps across the range of values within the photo from 0 == black to 254 == white. The taller the vertical bar for a particular value, the more pixels within the image at that value point. Bars at the two ends represent data that is out-of-range and theoretically lost to the image.

(I say theoretically because it is possible to "pull down" the bars at either extremes and redistribute data back into the low or high end of the histogram using the slider.

I'm not sure if the formerly "lost" data in the RAW image is actually recovered or if just an illusion of data recovery takes place, but as the end bars are pulled down the histogram across the usable range plumps-up, so I'm happy).

Most theoretical discussions of histograms talk about lovely symmetrical bell-curves shaped along a standard normal distribution.

That's lovely and all, but I almost never see anything like that in reality.

In fact, the three shown here are more "normal" than most I see in that they've got at least a semblance of a standard normal distribution bell curve in them -- kinda fattish in the middle, and tapering off toward each end. There are little spikey-guys at each end as well. Pretty typical, all in all.

Part of RAW conversion is doing a lot of it, learning to recognize what you've got to work with in a given photo, and making the best of that.

Anyway the three histograms shown have been adjusted by .1 Ev steps from -1.3 to -1.5 Ev -- and if you look not even too closely you can see that -1.4 Ev has the plumpest center section of the three.

(Further reductions or increases in Ev flattened-out the histogram pretty radically -- take my word for it -- see the "as-shot" histogram down below in the postscript).

So here's the image right before I clicked "OK" and "Convert" (clicky):

And here's the finished photo, after cropping and pulling up the low (black) end of the Levels by +5 (clicky):

Not necessarily the greatest Sports Photo of all Time, but a good example of Our Friend the Histogram(tm) in action.

p.s.:

1) Purists will wonder why I'm having to pull down the Exposure Compensation by -1.4 Ev in the first place.

Good question.

I shot this particular photo a little after sundown when I had just reset the EOS 5D Mark II's ISO from 1600 to 6400 in anticipation of the ongoing transition from fading daylight to full lighting by the field lights.

The original photo was pretty over-exposed. Here's the as-shot histogram:

The histogram's as flat as a pancake, and all the data's run off the right (white) end. So by pulling down the Exposure Compensation I pull the data back toward the center of the histogram, and Compensate for the bad Exposure.

Cool, huh?

A little later (probably at half time) I would also switch the White Balance from Daylight to Fluorescent, which seems to be the best compromise for the color of the field lights at Vashon High School stadium.

2) The sharp-eyed will note that I'm saving as an 8-bit tiff.

The immediate project here was to produce tiffs for conversion to jpegs to put up on my web site. 8-bit depth is fine for something that's going to end up as a 600-pixel wide jpeg for web display.

Actually, if I was to get an order for a reprint off of this image, I'd go right back to the original RAW file and start from zero...

It is absolutely astonishing...

2010-02-01T15:49:00.000-08:00

...how fantastic the output of the human optical system is, compared to the output of even a moderately high-end digital camera.

If you were to walk into the Chautauqua gym for a basketball game, the lighting would look perfectly fine to your eye: whites are white, skin is skin, everything's in it's proper color.

But to (even) a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, it's dark, and the lighting (some sort of halide lights) is some *really* weird color.

All of the following were shot at ISO 6400, manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6: my standard "indoor sports" setup. Working from past experience at the VHS gym, white balance was set to 4000K or "fluorescent".

Example 1: RAW converted with a white balance "As-shot fluorescent" (4000K) and with an exposure compensation of +1.6 which yields a nice, fat, well-centered histogram with just a tiny spike of data off the right end, which I don't care about since it's blown highlights that don't even end up in the cropped image:

This is just *way* too pinky-rosey-yellowy, or something. It's just not right.

Example 2: RAW converted with a manually-set white balance of "Color Temp" at 3300K (this after some experimentation) and with an exposure compensation of +1.6 also...

This one's better, but still too yellow to my eye, and the actual colors in that gym (the key, the back wall) are just not what I remember them to be.

Example 3: RAW converted, again, with a manually-set white balance of "Color Temp" at 3300K and with an exposure compensation of +1.6, but now color corrected in the tiff within Photoshop, this by manually selecting an area of white jersey in shadow (aka "faux" 18% gray) and clicking to define "white" for this image specifically

To my eye it's this last photo that's "correct", or maybe "more" or "most" correct. The whites finally look really white and all the other colors (the gray-green of the key is a good example, the wall in the background, the flesh tones in the shooter's left arm) are reasonably close to spot-on.

And the human optic system does all this correction on the fly, in real time, with out having to be told, and without us even thinking (or, for that matter, knowing) about it.

:-/

OK: Jumping ahead in time...

2010-01-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

...and returning to the motor-drive topic, here's a quick sketch I pulled together from four shots taken at VHS Boys Basketball v Charles Wright on 01/10/2010:

(click on the photo to see all four shots)

Historically I haven't like motor-drive much, probably because of some nonsense photography-purist stuff about wanting to catch The Moment(tm) rather than just letting the camera fire away and accepting whatever it happens to capture.

But motor-drive does work pretty well, at least if you take enough shots, which never seems to be a problem for me :-/

In this sequence there's only one shot missing, that between the third and fourth frames, which showed the shooter landing back on the floor but the ball not yet in the basket.

Timing for the sequence: 19:31:42 to 19:31:43, so roughly one second in duration, which matches the EOS 5D Mark II's advertised frame rate of 3.9 per second.

Again, I've also switched back to AI Servo auto-focus after a brief (and unexplainable) flirtation with AI Focus auto-focus, which just never seemed to do a consistently good job of tracking a moving subject, this despite the fact that it's supposed to switch from One-Shot auto-focus into AI Servo mode auto-magically.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; AI Servo auto-focus; ISO 6400; manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; white balance "Fluorescent" or 4000K.

The motor-drive...

2010-01-21T06:35:00.000-08:00

...sequences I shot at VHS Varsity Boys basketball v Cascade Christian on 12/18/09 seem to be coming out pretty well. I can see issues with consistent focusing within a series of shots: for some reason I shot with "AI Focus Auto-Focus" which is supposed to automatically switch from single-shot AF to AI Servo AF as needed.

Since the subjects in basketball are rarely stationary I have to wonder why I did it this way, but you gotta try stuff to see how stuff works.

Last night at VHS Varsity (both girls and boys) basketball v Charles Wright I shot entirely in "AI Servo ("for Moving Subjects") Auto-Focus" and very quick checks of shots while the game was underway seem to show more consistently accurate focusing through a sequence of shots, even when the subject was covering a big distance across the floor.

I'll know more when I get last night's photos burned onto DVD and get a look at them on the computer...

Wrestling...

2010-01-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

...as I started to say elsewhere, is an interesting sport to shoot.

There's long periods of relative inactivity that are very subtle isometric battles, and then suddenly there's a burst of real motion as the balance of power shifts.

Combine that with the fact that there's a whole lot going on all at one: at the Rock Island Tournament they start out with three mats going at once, and this year (to kinda move things along..) they did the finals matches on two mats, simultaneously.

My best angle is right on the floor, on my knees (wearing my old volleyball kneepads) just inside the ropes that mark off the aisles from the mats.

So the backgrounds are incredibly busy: I'm shooting straight across the mat with the opposite bleachers in the immediate background.

There's a kind of Bruegel's-Fall-of-Icarus atmosphere about the whole thing: there's this titanic struggle going on out on the mat all the while a whole bunch of people are doing other stuff right beyond, seemingly oblivious to what's going on right in front of them.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 75mm; image stabilization on; AI Focus auto-focus; ISO 6400; white balance "fluorescent"; hand-held; manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6.

OK: what have...

2010-01-07T11:48:00.001-08:00

...I learned?

That I need to shoot a lot more wrestling so I have some better feel as to what is The Real Moment(tm), so I don't shoot so bloody many photos.

I shot over 1,400 photos at Rockbusters wrestling, and over 1,700 at the Rock Island Tournament.

Part of the problem is that wrestling is characterized by relatively long periods of isometric inactivity, punctuated by relatively brief moments of very fast action.

So I have a tendency to start shooting as soon as someone flinches.

Combine that with my general policy of shooting everyone, and not just the stars, and combine that with the fact that the Rockbusters tournament went about six hours long, and the Rock Island Tournament went almost nine hours, and I get an almost-unwieldy number of photos to wade through.

Basically after the RAW files are burned to DVD I load half of them onto one Window$ box, and half onto the second Window$ box I have.

I do the post-processing (RAW conversion with exposure compensation; then rotating, cropping, levels adjustment and saving the resulting file as a tiff) on these two separate Window$ boxes, switching back and forth via a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch, so I can keep the process moving along just about as fast as possible.

But it still takes a while...

:-/

Whew...

2010-01-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

...where am I?

Post-processing Rockbusters Wrestling from 12/12/09; waiting in the wings, VHS Wrestling's Rock Island Wrestling Tournament from 12/28/09, as is Girls and Boys Varsity Basketball v Cascade Christian from 12/18/09.

I mean, I love the holidays and all, but they can be a real setback...

:-/

I shot...

2009-12-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

...VHS Boys and Girls Varsity basketball v Cascade Christian last night with two major changes:

~~I went back to AI Servo Auto-focus from AI Focus Auto-focus~~ (which I don't usually use, and which I used exclusively for VHS Boys and Girls Basketball v Fife), and

(Actually as it turned out I didn't switch to AI Servo after all, but shot in AI Focus Auto-Focus...)

I used motor-drive extensively, which I don't usually use, rather hoping to catch That One Moment(tm) simply by timing and luck

In the first case, the distinction between the two focusing modes is (supposedly) that AI Servo tracks moving subjects continually ("While you hold down the shutter button halfway, the subject will be focused continually.") and AI Focus switches between One Shot Auto-focus ("When you press the shutter button halfway, the camera will focus only once.") and AI Servo automatically, as soon as the subject starts moving.

I've found from working through the Fife basketball photos (AI Focus, not AI Servo) is that, in fact, none of them seem to be focused right-on: many of them are close, but none of them are really great.

In the second case, I've never been really impressed with motor drive because once you press the shutter it's just *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* and there's really no particular guarantee that any one of the *bang*'s (as it were) is going to be, again, That One Moment(tm).

So I've got to get last night's photos burned to DVD so I can move them over to a Window$ box and get a look at 'em.

I love...

2009-12-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

...depth of field, and color.

This from Vashon Island Soccer Club Wasabi GU-12 soccer, just put up.

f5.6 has become my favorite aperture, I guess because it produces effective depth-of-field for objects that are reasonably separated, and yet provides for full focus on the subject itself.

Details: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f2.8L at 120mm; ISO 800; Exposure aperture priority (Av) at f5.6 and 1000th second; White Balance "daylight".

Here's a good shot...

2009-12-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

...from VHS Girls Varsity basketball v North Mason, which I just put up.

The basketball's not even in the image and yet you get a strong sense of what's happened: the shot's off, the defender's late, who knows if it dropped, the photo stands on its own as a statement about basketball without containing the entire narrative.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 73mm; ISO 6400; Manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; white balance "fluorescent/4000K"; AI Servo auto-focus with a single, center focus point.

Which brings up a question...

2009-12-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

...why do I shoot so bloody many photos at any given event?

Good question.

Law of Averages: take a lot of photos, and something's bound to be good ;-)
I'm not into journalistic photography, where the reporter needs one shot to augment the (text-based) story. I want to shoot the entire event visually, not just the moment
I very consciously try to get shots of everyone, not just the stars.
Why not? One of the particular things I like about digital photography is that there's no significant monetary cost associated with one photo, or one hundred, or one thousand
When I empty out the compact flash card, it's re-formatted and then it's empty and then it's completely reusable
Compare and contrast with chemical photography, which is where I came from, where I'd agonize over whether to shoot a 24 or a 36, and then agonize about having a given roll processed when all 24 or 36 frames weren't shot
When I burn a shoot onto DVD's (which is the very first thing that I do after the images come off the CF card) my cost there is about 66 cents per DVD -- this for a high-quality Taiyo Yuden DVD and a polypropylene C-shell DVD case -- so when I burn an average DVD with maybe 230 images on it (and that wouldn't be full) my cost is about .00287 cents per image
So (for example) the entire evening's worth of 1,047 photographs for VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife cost me 5 DVD's or $3.30 actual cash expense
Extra Credit Question: how much would 1,047 photos cost me if I was still shooting Ektachrome?

OK: so, time?

You would think that it takes a ton of time to go through 1,000 shots, and in a sense it does, but the wading-through and weeding-out goes something like "nope.. nope.. nope.. nope.. wait a minute.." and it's the wait-a-minutes that get RAW converted into tiffs, and post-processed into the first-cut candidates.

Then when I've got all the first-cuts converted, cropped and adjusted I go through 'em again, which is something like "OK.. OK.. OK.. nah.." and the "nah's" get gone, and then I edit the perl script that actually generates all the jpegs and all the html, run the script, edit the resulting html a little, integrate the new html into the rest of my web site, put the jpegs up on Amazon S3, and we're good to go!

Every now and then...

2009-12-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

...you really get one. (Click on the photo for the full view).

I shot 1,047 photos at VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife last night, 443 at the girls' game and 607 at the boys' game -- the difference being mostly cheerleader shots and crowd shots and band shots during the boys' game -- and every now and then I really get one.

This was late in the fourth quarter with the Pirates fairly well up; as I remember it (it's all kinda a blur when you watch a basketball game through a viewfinder) on a steal-fast break with only one Fife defender who was able to even get close to getting back on defense.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom at 70mm; ISO 6400; White Balance "fluorescent"; Exposure "Manual" at 250th second at f5.6; hand-held, available light.

A definite keeper ;-)

And both the Pirate boys and the Pirate girls Varsity won: Girls 51-38, Boys 58-43!

A milestone of sorts...

2009-12-09T21:14:00.000-08:00

...happened at the Pirates' basketball game this evening down at the High School gym.

I just shot my first 10,000 shots (in fact 10,227 by actual count) on the new EOS 5D Mark II.

:-/

This poses a logistical problem of sorts, one that I've had to come to terms with before.

If I want all my photos to be sequential when I put them up on my web site ( xxxx_some_event_name.jpg -- where xxxx are four incrementing digits) what do I do when I roll over from IMG_9999.CR2 to IMG_0001.CR2?

I use the Linux rename command to rename the RAW files, dropping the IMG_ prefix, and adding a "1" prefix to the 9xxx.CR2 file names, and a "2" prefix to the 0xxx.CR2 file names, and now my shots wrap around from 19,999 to 20,000 and onward.

Cool, huh?

'Course I'll also use rename to add a more descriptive middle to the RAW files, something like _Boys_Varsity_BBall_v_Fife_120909 most likely...

When it goes right...

2009-12-08T16:56:00.000-08:00

...and when it goes wrong.

Well, maybe not really wrong but just not optimal.

The VISC Wasabi GU-12 soccer match I shot in the morning Saturday went wrong because I was trying to get out of the house too fast.

Bright-bright-bright cloudless sunny mid-morning day with a low winter sun angle at the south end of the pitch.

Didn't put the 1.4x extender on the 70-200mm f2.8L, so I was short about 28mm on the wide end, and short about 80mm on the tele end of what I could have had, which would have been 98mm-280mm.

Really makes a difference for field sports...

Then I forgot to make a Mr. Green Jeans exposure compensation for all the green: green grass, green uniforms, green background in the woods outside the playfield fence.

Then I found I had forgotten to empty out my CF cards from the previous night's basketball games, but since I had almost 2 hours before the next match -- Buccaneers GU-13 -- I could easily go home and fix everything: empty out the CF cards, put on the 1.4x extender, and actually sit and think about why the soccer match I'd just shot was consistently over-exposed by 2/3 stop...

The afternoon's match with the extender and with exposure compensation for all the green yielded consistently better shots.

What a better place to be...

2009-12-08T15:30:00.001-08:00

...than on a soccer pitch on a cold-and-sunny December Saturday afternoon?

Buccaneers GU-13 at half time.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f2.8 with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm, this shot at 98mm.

ISO 800; White Balance "Daylight"; Aperture priority exposure at f8.0 yielding 400th second; exposure compensation -2/3 (Mr. Green Jeans);

Here's a...

2009-12-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

...very quick first pick from Varsity girls v West Seattle last night:

This was the first opportunity I had to get the new EOS 5D Mark II into the Vashon High School gym and see what it would do.

I'm very impressed.

First off, having a native ISO of 6400 means that I can set a reasonable manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6, stop action pretty well, and still have something that I can actually see when I'm reviewing photos for RAW conversion and post-processing.

Details:

EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L; center spot-point focusing with AI Servo Auto-focus
White Balance 4000K, for "standard" metal halide lighting; this was kind of a guess since the VHS gym lights are notorious for their weird color due to the random way light bulbs have been replaced over the years, and due to the wildly varying ages of the bulbs themselves
ISO 6400; manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; hand-held available light
RAW conversion: Smart Noise Reduction "normal"; White Balance "Color temp" of 4000K; Sharpness "As-shot" of 3; this particular photo had an Exposure Compensation of +0.6
Post-processing: rotate right 0.5 degree; crop; pull up the low end in Levels to +5

Oh yeah! Varsity won 57-52, and JV won 49-39!

Go Pirates!

Things are getting...

2009-12-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

...a little tricky with the RAW conversion for the McMurray girls' soccer photos.

What's going on is that I shot from daytime-no field lights into darkness-full field lights.

The daytime photos were shot White Balance "cloudy" because that's what it was.

The full nighttime photos were shot White Balance 3300K because that's what it was then.

What's happening now is that I'm doing the dusk photos: the final photos of the Varsity match is mostly "daylight" with the field lights just starting to come on, and the first JV match photos were taken as it got darker and darker and the field lights had more and more effect.

So at the moment I'm manually converting the Varsity at 5200K, and manually converting the JV photos at 4500K.

I suspect the Varsity photos will ease toward 4500K at the last of them, and at some point I'll ease down to 3300K as the JV photos move into full darkness.

:-/

This photo's...

2009-12-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

...pretty amazing on a bunch of different levels:

Where to start?

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; this shot at 98mm
ISO 6400, with no (that's as in "none") digital noise reduction after RAW conversion
I screwed up and (because I kept wiping the camera off with a towel from my trunk during one of Puget Sound's famous "drowning mists") actually shot this at 320th second, f5.6, rather than the 250th of a second I had really intended
So during RAW conversion this received an exposure compensation of +2.0
Manually set White Balance at 3300K in the camera, and during RAW conversion; noise reduction "high" during RAW conversion; sharpness "3" as-shot during RAW conversion
(You can see how the White Balance of 3300K really works pretty well because you can discern the different hues between the stripes on the jersey, which are a very pale cream, and the numbers, which as is the ball, are white)
Adjusted Levels down to 240 on the high end during post-processing

And all this was from a shot made under the (in)famous McMurray field lights, which are adequate for human vision at night, but worse than a joke for photography.

Fortunately the subject was right in front of me, and the light tower was just back off behind my right shoulder.

Tuesday night's...

2009-12-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

...VISC soccer practices gave me a very good opportunity to work on several things I don't usually get to mess with during the course of an actual game.

A manually-set color temperature of 3300K for the McMurray field lights works about as good as anything's going to get to establish the proper white balance at RAW conversion
Shot at manual exposure, ISO 6400, 250th second, f5.6, and just let 'er rip: pick up the exposure pieces during RAW conversion and post-processing
alternated between a single center-point-focus and the generic 9 auto-focus points; jury's still out, although I'm still tending to think that the single center-point-focus works best
alternated between single shot and motor drive; in the past I've found that motor drive doesn't necessarily do any better at catching that One Perfect Moment(tm) than just becoming familiar with a sport and leaving the timing up to my shutter finger

Also I was able to get out on the field, right next to the goal, and get the lights (such as they are) somewhat where I wanted them...

Well...

2009-11-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

...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...

2009-11-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

...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...

2009-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

...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...

2009-11-30T08:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Now up...

2009-11-28T21:25:00.000-08:00

...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...

Nutcracker 2008...

2009-11-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

...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.

I know!

2009-11-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

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.

Now up...

2009-11-24T13:50:00.000-08:00

...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.

:-)

Working on...

2009-11-22T07:27:00.000-08:00

...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.

Now up...

2009-11-21T18:31:00.000-08:00

...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.

Now up...

2009-11-20T17:52:00.000-08:00

...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...

2009-11-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

...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!

Well, that's interesting...

2009-11-19T10:27:00.000-08:00

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...

Well...

2009-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

...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.

Wow!

2009-11-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-11-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

...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.

For the fun of it...

2009-11-15T11:29:00.001-08:00

...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:

2009-11-15T07:49:00.001-08:00

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...

Just shot...

2009-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

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!

Now up...

2009-11-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Just shot...

2009-11-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

...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...

Now up...

2009-11-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-11-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

...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).

Well, the good news is...

2009-11-09T15:36:00.000-08:00

...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...

2009-11-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

...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...

Now up...

2009-11-08T16:21:00.001-08:00

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

White balance redux...

2009-11-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

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

Now up...

2009-11-05T21:38:00.001-08:00

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"

Note to self:

2009-11-03T12:48:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-11-03T06:54:00.000-08:00

Putting up Vashon Island Soccer Club GU13 Phoenix and GU12 Riptides

Working on...

2009-11-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Most Recent...

2009-11-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

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.

More on White Balance...

2009-10-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a shot from Pirates-v-Cedar Park that's been RAW converted two different ways:

1) converted as "fluorescent/as shot" or 4000K

and 2) converted as "tungsten" or 3200K in Breeze Browser, which is what I use for RAW conversion.

Fluorescent definitely looks "better" and more "correct".

On White Balance...

2009-10-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

Well, the idea that I'd shoot some photos last night at the Cedar Park game (did I mention that the Pirates won, 59-6? No? Well, they did..) while it was "before it was fully dark" turned out to be nonsense. When I got to the high school at 6:30 pm it *was* dark and the only light was the field lights.

Decided to set the white balance at "fluorescent" or 4000K as a compromise/experiment because that's the same color temperature as "standard" metal halide lights, and I figured that having all the photos shot to the same white balance would be better than "Auto" since if fluorescent was off, I could correct duing RAW conversion.

We'll see: I'm burning the *. Cr2 files to DVD right now...

Next up...

2009-10-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

VHS Football versus Cedar Park, tonight at 7:00 pm. Right now the long-range doppler radar looks pretty good. Probably wear my full rain suit but no boots. 70-200mm f2.8 zoom with 1.4x extender for 98mm-280mm effective focal length, probably take my Kata rain hood but hope to leave it in the trunk.

Speaking of white balance: I'm going to do a custom white balance after it gets fully dark: shoot a white card, do Menu > Custom WB and select the white card just photographed, exit the Menu, press and set White Balance to the "Custom" icon.

Before it gets fully dark I'm going to set the White Balance at "Daylight" which is 5200K and see how that works.

Metal Halide lamps seem to run in a range from 2300K for "white corrected" (Often used as accent lighting to blend in with fluorescent 2700K applications) to 4000K for "standard" (Used in general lighting; factories: parking lots, warehouses) to 5500K for "Hylux" (Daylight lamps: horticulture, aquariums, high color definition).

Ref: www.venturelighting.com/TechCenter/Lamps/color_of_light.htm

Quickie Tech Note...

2009-10-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

Auto White Balance sucks.

A quick hack to overcome some of the bizarre colors rendered by auto white balance in, say, football photos shot at night in available light under metal-halide field lighting is to select a known white area, copy and paste it into a white_sample.tif, and save that.

Then paste the white_sample.tif into a photo that needs a little help, drag it up to a corner, and flatten layers.

Do an Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Cast (or whatever your specific syntax, you get the idea) on the pasted white sample, and voila!

Quick-and-dirty, and it does an amazingly good job most of the time.

Next shoot...

2009-10-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

Halloween night up in town, maybe 4:30 pm 'till who knows when.

Shooting photos of anyone and everyone.

I'll be in costume ;-)

Ask for a free (non-Halloween) scary story!

Hoping to see a lot of my Chautauqua buds!

Next shoot...

2009-10-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

VHS Pirates football v Cedar Park, Friday October 30, 7:00pm, VHS Stadium.

Hope the weather won't be too crappy; right now it looks like "Friday: A 40 percent chance of rain. Cloudy, with a high near 57. South southwest wind between 9 and 14 mph." with the chance of rain increasing to 90% Friday night.

Oh well, it can't be as bad as Homecoming...

Can it?

Working on...

2009-10-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

VHS Pirates football v Lakeside, October 18, 2009. Pirates win, 44-13. Got some very good offensive and defensive sequences. My sense of timing in shooting football is improving. That, and taking over 900 photos helps...

New photos up...

2009-10-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

Vashon Pirates Youth Football from Saturday, October 3

VPYF has taken over the 7th-8th grade football program from McMurray Middle School. These were shot at a home game against Gig Harbor.

Working on...

2009-10-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

Vashon Island Soccer Club GU14 (Phoenix) and GU13 (Riptide) soccer from Saturday, October 24; VHS Football from several dates; VHS Volleyball from Thursday, October 21

Basically trying to get caught up :-/

Recent shoot

2009-10-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

Tuesday 10/27/09: VHS Girls soccer versus Charles Wright, and Senior's Night. The Pirates won handily 4-0, and I got almost no shots of our keeper because she was so lightly stressed during the match.

EOS 5D, hand-held, available light, ISO 1600, 200th sec at f8.0, 70-200mm f2.8L zoom with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm.

First Blog!

2009-10-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

ha-ha-ha!

That's a /. joke from about maybe ten years ago...

FinchHaven

mkay...

*Whew* That was really...

Further thoughts about Adobe Lightroom...

OK: Adobe Bridge...

OK: Adobe Lightroom...

Tried something a little...

There is an immediate answer...

Well, that may have answered...

File and workflow management...

Well, I've really...

Seems I should have...

Version 1.6.2 of Versus TV's...

Versus TV's Tour de France...

The degree of duplicity...

I've been involved...

RAW Conversion: what's in a histogram?

It is absolutely astonishing...

OK: Jumping ahead in time...

The motor-drive...

Wrestling...

OK: what have...

Whew...

I shot...

I love...

Here's a good shot...

Which brings up a question...

Every now and then...

A milestone of sorts...

When it goes right...

What a better place to be...

Here's a...

Things are getting...

This photo's...

Tuesday night's...

Well...

Welcome back...

Well, bummer...

Next shoot...

Now up...

Nutcracker 2008...

I know!

Now up...

Working on...

Now up...

Now up...

Working on...

Well, that's interesting...

Well...

Wow!

Just shot...

For the fun of it...

Very first impressions:

Just shot...

Now up...

Just shot...

Now up...

I just got back...

Well, the good news is...

Holy Cr*pola, Batman...

Now up...

White balance redux...

Now up...

Note to self:

Working on...

Working on...

Most Recent...

More on White Balance...

On White Balance...

Next up...

Quickie Tech Note...

Next shoot...

Next shoot...

Working on...

New photos up...

Working on...

Recent shoot

First Blog!

Whew That was really...