Blog Marco

The famous Dove advertisement - retouching a woman's photo to make her look fantastic. Simply amazing what a little airbrushing and photoshop retouching techniques can do...

I had trouble with my set of rechargeable batteries today. I have some 25 1.2V NiMH batteries that I recharged one set after another with my four battery 1 hour rapid charger.

Photographers can't live without rechargeable batteries. Otherwise, simply switching batteries would cost a fortune.

My flash - the Nikon SB-800 simply chews through the batteries. So it's important that each of the five batteries in the flash are running at optimal strength.

When I was testing out the batteries, it made a strange hissing sound when I placed a set of five batteries in the flash. It was a hissing sound that didn't want to go away. I tried a few different battery combinations and it went away.

By the way that hissing sound isn't the normal whine that you hear when the capacitors in the flash are charging up.

I found out what the problem was... with my voltmeter, I tested out each and every battery. All were fine, outputting a healthy 1.2V, but a few batteries had an erratic volt reading and one didn't have one at all.

A simple recharge with those batteries and a retest, showed everything was fine. And I was about to go complain that the batteries had not lasted its full claimed lifetime of 1000 cycles!

Interesting...

Keira herself has spoken openly of not having breasts, but 'pecs', and said that she would die for a curvy body like Scarlett Johansson's.

The actress says her breasts were digitally boosted for the advertising campaign for her 2004 movie King Arthur.

She then went on to say the incident was certainly not the first time she has had her chest digitally enhanced.

She explained: 'I did one magazine and found out you're not actually allowed to be on a cover in the US without at least a C cup because it turns people off.

'Apparently they have done market research and found that women want to see no less than a C cup on other women. Isn't that crazy? 'So they made my t*** bigger for that as well.'

Here is Vanessa Minnillo again at The 34th Annual FIFI Awards... It's an interesting angle... It makes Vanessa Minnillo look sexy and awkward-looking at the same time. This is definitely not something you would tell your model to do... The body is all stretched and distorted - and it is distracting. Although it does give the viewer something to look at. :) Maybe Vanessa has a valis excuse - maybe she was walking away and a photographer probably shouted at her and she probably just turned... Anyway, Vanessa Minnillo, please don't do that.

Aerial Photography is a whole different kettle of fish compared to the usual techniques and styles used for landscape photography. You may be surprised to see the results of your work if you were to apply the same methodology and thinking for aerial photography and your landscape photography. A bit of research and practise may get you off on a good start when you apply your aerial photography theory into practise. Hopefully this aerial photography primer and tutorial will give you a good start.

Channels surfing on the TV I found a show called Degrassi high - The New Generation. Following up on the show - as I usually do with any show, I looked up bios of the actors etc... I found a website with a photo gallery that had pretty interesting photos... In Cassie Steele's Website, surf to "gallery" and then to "Brickworks". The annoying thing about this website is the flash. (It makes it slow going and messy IMHO).

The Photographer responsible for the photography on the website is Mark Wilson. - who is a Canadian photographer.

I did a bit of experimenting at a graduation event the other week.

Mind the blurred faces: this is only for illustration purposes only.

The first photo settings are: Manual camera settings: @65mm F8 : 1/30 secs with flash at TTL.

The goal of this photo was to expose for both the candle light in the background as well as the foreground subjects, while also darkening the back to blacken out the distracting background.

The shutter speed is much less than the focal length, hence it is recommended that you use a tripod or brace yourself (lean against a table or wall or tighten your elbows) when taking the photo, to avoid blur.

Another feature of the room was low ceilings which made for a good bounce light environment. the flash was angled at 45 degrees and with the reflector card out - to capture the catch light in their eyes. (A feature in the SB-800)

A consequence of these settings is that you produce a photo that is severely underexposed. I photoshopped the photo using the curves feature only to push the exposure on the subjects.

When my photography job finished the other night, I wanted to try a spontaneous shot.

I pulled the SB-800 flash off my camera, changed it to wireless settings, changed the on-camera flash to be the commander at 1/2 power.

My D70 was on manual settings at F5.6 and 1/50secs.

The setup for these shots were only about a minute or two, and i didn't really calculate what exposure I would be getting from the 1/2 power flash.
These photographs were shot with kit lens Nikon D70 camera with the Nikon SB-800 flash.

This photo is what you often get with mobile phone cameras if you forget about the time delay... (having gotten so used to the DSLR Nikon D70... or any digital SLR for that matter)

"For sports, usually it's the timing and prefocus that matters. I think it's basically useless to have a machine gun of a camera if you cant get the timing and prefocus (basically the technique) properly. Just think of how the great sports shooters back in the day used to shoot manually (focus, meter, etc) and added to that not have the luxury of a motor drive, and yet they still come out with amazing award-winning shots."

This photo was taken at the TV tower in Shanghai. The view is of Huangpo river in Shanghai.

I feel as if I fluked the feeling of this photo. It really was not intended to look as if it were a glum photo.

Before processing this photo in Photoshop, the photo looks like any other tourist landscape of some city taken from a tower.

I think it was the smog and the fact that it was a cloudy day that contributed to the whole look of the photo.

You may want to visit this page for more information on Shanghai.

What kind of fish is this? who knows... Wish I knew... That's what you get when you're with a tour group rushing through the whole experience.

Picture me, trying to take a great picture - setting up the camera settings, waiting for the fish to be in the right spot, making sure the photo is in focus, making sure the flash reflection isn't eveident in the photo... it was great that a few photos actually turned out decent after that rushed experience.

I used an off camera flash - SB-800 with the on-camera flash on the D70 working as the commander. I angled the off camera flash in one hand - while taking the shot with the other. Obviously the angle of the flash was trying to prevent the flash reflection. I also used the 50mm f1.4, as it was the fastest lens I had with me. I tried to balance the speed of the lens (consequence is that the faster you set it the less depth of field you get), the speed of the exposure/film (ISO 200-1000? - consequence is that the faster you set that, the more grainier your pictures will look).

I think I also played with the effect with setting the camera to shutter priority but it didn't really give me the results I wanted as it always wanted f1.4 which meant a really shallow depth of field.

So what I decided was to get a good enough exposure, with enough depth of field to cover the subject, with the least grain I can get away with, so that I can play with it in photoshop to overexpose it slightly.

This photos is the result of a little cropping and curves in Photoshop.

A photo with a part of our tour group.

This was taken with a digital SLR on AUTO mode. I then crudely photoshopped it to slightly overexpose the foreground. The foreground was severely underexposed due to the cloudy weather and the weak on-camera flash which wasn't powerful enough to fill-in the foreground.

If I had an off-camera flash, it may give better results - but since it was cloudy - the photos would look a little dull nonetheless.

50mm f1.6 1/100s A view of a boat with fairy lights on the Huangpo. The building behind had somesort of glowing billboard that dynamically changed every second like a TV.

f1.6 1/100s Manual Mode. Shanghai skyline. Note the colonial style skyline.

This couple made an intersting website detailing their tour around Shanghai - includes a nice pictorial.

Don't expect anything like that here. :P