At the moment the portfolios and shoots buttons in the menu don’t have any items in them but that will change quickly over the coming weeks! After launching AMW Studios with my partner Ariel a few years ago we are finally doing well enough to start putting time into other forms of photography. In the coming weeks I hope to build an editorial and architectural portfolio to help propel this business and my photography.

Video will be another add in as MWynne Productions comes together! It is a very exciting time for me and I hope that you will check back often!

Check it out at http://www.pocketwizard.com

I may have gone over board on the screen capture but I want it to be as obvious as possible that this is another persons blog. Just click the screen capture and watch the video at Joe McNally’s Blog.

Hope everyone had a happy holiday!

Today my interest was peaked by a look into my own past. I was born in Berlin, Germany…West Berlin at the time and this morning Rob Galbraith posted some links to a few galleries showing photographs of the wall.

One such link led me to MAGNUM PHOTOS, where I was able to delightfully rediscover some of the work that drew me to photography to begin with. David Alan Harvey is an amazingly talented photographer with a vision that has inspired me for years and I hope that some of you will take the time to view some of his work the next time you “let your mouse do the clicking”.

For some interesting reading check out Burn Magazines Dialogue Section. David Alan Harvey is the editor and this is his new blog in place of the old Road Trip Blog.

So what determines a “Correct” exposure? Well, for the sake of argument a correct exposure would record each color tone as it appears in real life. You will often hear people referring to a “Grey Card”. This is simply a card that reflects 18% of all light that hits it. If you point your camera at this card and fill the view finder with just the card, you would have a “Correct” exposure when the light meter was at 0 or centered.

It is really a pretty simple concept, your camera has a light meter in it. This measures the amount of light being reflected off of the subject. Based on the amount of light being reflected the meter determines what the object will look like if you take the photograph with your current settings and displays that tonal value to you on a chart. The chart (for most of you reading this) is on the bottom edge of your viewfinder and has a + sign at one side, a – sign at the other and a 0 in the middle.

• +||||||0||||||- Nikon
•  
• -||||||0||||||+ Cannon

So if the indicator is on the + side of 0 then the image will be brighter or closer to white and if the indicator is on the – side of 0 then the image will be darker or closer to black. This means, if you are photographing a white wall you want the indicator to be all the way to the + sign without going over and if you are photographing a black wall you want the indicator to be all the way to the – sign without going over.

The light meter we find in the viewfinder helps us to get the exposure right before we take the picture but what about after. The LCD display on the back of the camera is NOT an accurate rendition of the image that we have captured so how do we know if we got what we wanted? That is where the histogram comes in. That thing that looks like a photo of jagged mountains, that is important.

In the image above, the histogram is the image to the right. The histogram tells us how many pixels fall into each tonal value from 0 to 255. The higher the peak the more pixels in that tonal value. Every histogram is read from left (0) to right (255) or black to white respectively. Looking at the photo the scene is about 1 stop brighter than middle grey, so our light meter in the view finder should have looked like this:

• +||||||0||||||- Nikon
•  
• -||||||0||||||+ Cannon

And our histogram ends up looking like the one above, shifted 1 stop to the right. This particular photo is a composite of exposures combined in Photoshop to reach a good overall exposure. This is done most often in architecture and landscapes because the sensor is not capable of capturing the dynamic range or range of tonal values with one exposure. To the sensor black and white are only 256 integers apart while to the human eye black and white are closer to 2,560 integers apart. As a result the photo has areas that are over and under exposed. so we take multiple exposures and combine them to make one image.

For now, I only did this to show the varying degrees of exposure and the histograms to go with them. So here is the exposure for the brightest parts of the image.

Notice the histogram! It has shifted dramatically from 1 stop to the plus side all the way to the right hand edge.

Now look at the exposure for the dark parts of the image.

The the dramatic shift again. This time from one stop over to actually running off the right side of the histogram. The info that runs off the right edge of the histogram shows up as a big block of pure white, no information at all. This is called clipping.

So now you have seen an image that is under exposed, one that is over exposed and one that is just right. When you look at the histogram, clipping is bad 90% of the time. The big thing to remember, is that the light meter in your camera has a +(white) and a -(black), look at the scene you are photographing and determine if it is really dark, really bright or somewhere in between and then set the indicator accordingly with the camera settings. Double check with your histogram to make sure you haven’t gone to far over or under and you should be taking usable exposures quickly.

This is unlikely to actually occur, but along the way I come across all types of work. Good, bad… everything in between and it shocks me how high the percentage is of good work being shown at the F Stop Magazine. They find all types of photographers and display their work to the world. I am not sure what their readership is like, but any one that isnt watching them should be.

Here is a link to the most recent article they have posted. Check it out if you get a chance and don’t forget to bookmark their RSS.

Location shooting can be very difficult depending on where you end up but bringing a studio to a location like the design center is usually much easier than most.

1. The guys at the Boston Furniture Collaborative are kind enough to keep a roll of 12′ seamless hung in the 20′ wide hallway for me most of the time
2. When you flip the light switch all of the lights go out
3. I have more than 150′ to back up and finally,
4. There are ample wall sockets to plug into with easy breaker (and restroom) access.

The list may seem strange to some but, combined with a hard working assistant, these things make life a vacation for a photographer. There is one window to worry about when you have to burn in ambient light, like I did for this piece:

…but it never gets direct light and it comes from a narrow spot in the hall that can easily be blocked.

Even with all of these great advantages to the location, it is still not a studio and requires a bit more post production than I would like.

Here is the original. (I have already done the basic LR adjustments)

And this is just for a side by side comparison, before and after post process.

Before

After

There are more photos from the shoot but this piece required the most effort because of the lack of a controlled studio. For this shoot I was also without an assistant and this was a rather large, shiny piece of very expensive furniture. All said and done it was a great day and the images came out beautifully.

Some locations can result in what seems like an endless effort in photoshop. The design center is thankfully not one of them but as I was walking down the 150 feet of hallway to turn out the overhead lights for what seemed like the 150th time of the day due to my lack of an assistant I couldn’t help but think of studio space and how much easier a controlled environment is.

• 1. Cannon’s G10
• 2. Nikon’s P6000
• 3. Panasonic’s LX3

Without getting to involved here with comparisons, I went with Nikon’s P6000.

I have been using it for the past few months and feel comfortable reviewing it here.

The basic layout of the camera follows in line with any other Nikon I have used. It is very easy to operate without entering the menu’s so long as you take the time to set the camera up the way you like it. There is a quick My Menu button on the back that allows you to list the functions that are the most important to you. This is a great feature when you actually intend to use the camera for work.

I have quick access to the various flash controls for quickly swapping external flashes and pocket wizards for set up shots and detail shots on job sites. Nothing that goes to the client just quirky things for blog posts and tweets.

You can see in the photos above that the camera does have a hot shoe. This can be used for flashes, Nikon CLS support included, or pocket wizard’s. Really anything you can mount in a hot shoe will go in there and fire, so long as you (or your assistant) don’t mind looking like a complete idiot. Even a PW is bigger than this camera but thats kind of the whole point in getting it to bring along. (For it to be small and easy to carry, not to look like an idiot)

There is a big sticker on the front of this tiny camera that brags about its ability to shoot at ISO 6400. This sticker is perhaps far more embarrassing than the way the camera looks with an SB900 mounted on top. The files are almost unusable beyond ISO 400, unless you really love Chromatic Noise. Not a big deal though, I wasn’t interested in low light performance from a small camera, and none of the other options are any better at this. The good news is that you can tell the camera what ISO you want to use or you can give it a max ISO for the automatic ISO setting.

My biggest complaint with this camera is the lens. Zoomed in the Aperture becomes 7.1 while zoomed out the aperture can go to 2.7. I would love to see Nikon go the way that Panasonic went. Less zoom range but a consistently wide aperture. Small sensors just can’t handle small apertures. They end up with vignettes that leave images looking soft, very soft at 7.1. The glass doesn’t matter, the angles are just to dramatic for the sensor.

All things considered, I think that Nikon did a great job with this camera. It is right on par with the G10 from Cannon but if I had it to do over, I would get the Panasonic LX3. They have done a much better job of recognizing the failings of small sensors and working with them rather than fighting them. The aperture stability alone is a huge advantage but it also offers 720p video recording and while I am happy with the short clips that the P6000 produces, 720p would head and shoulders above in quality.