Still Shooting with the newly learned technique

Taking pictures has been an up and down experience. We bought a new camera, got ourselves exciting, went to take pictures of the leaves, chairs in the park, then the street, old men, street lamp. Then we stop taking pictures until we find another new camera, we then went through the same again. More leaves, more chairs, more street, more old men, more street lamp.

Not that I am against getting new gear for the fun of fondling a new toy, we have to try shooting something new all the times. The internet is flooded with review on equipments. Of course, bloggers have to make money, so they write something that is constantly renewed i.e. gears (this matches the need of camera companies keep coming up with new cameras with a twist here and there), many blogs contain pretty useless reviews if we consider a len sharp enough to recognize the image properly is good enough, we don't need any more reviews.

A few blogs ago, I said I learned a lot from Overgaard's blog, still experiencing it everyday to polish the new technique.

This is a twist to shoot night shots with different white balance, instead of using auto white balance or day light, I used tungsten. The camera added more blue than normal, thus creating interesting bluish violet color on the window frame. The look is very new to me so I consider this to be interesting.

this pictures was taken without a tripod handheld at less than 1/8 second. You can see the buildings are sharp and from the light streak created by the moving car you can roughly guess how slow is the shutter speed. The lamp showed a nice beautify star sign in the middle. The trick is just learned from Overgaard. I learn more in two of his blogs than many other blogs. He also has good teaching on lightroom3 which I am trying to learn how to use.

Changing of Photo Style

It is interesting to change my shooting style. In Hong Kong I use my General External Receptor Camera, set everything to Black and White, increase the contrast by two notch in the camera. Friends who know which camera, please keep it to themselves because I shall not review any camera brand in this blog becuase the title is "Camera not Important".

Here is the result.

Since I am following the recommendation of www.Overgaard.dk, the setting is ISO 800, using a 21mm lens (equivalent to 31.5mm), Auto exposure, with some increase of exposure by 0.3 - 0.7 stop depending on the scene. Generally I found increasing by 0.3 can improve the shadow a bit, but in B/W picture, i am still not very clear how will the noise behave if underexpose.

The images are very refereshing because black and white pictures will take away the colour senses which sometimes distracts our eyes due to a brighter red, orange, yellow colour. In B/W everything is either light, shadow or grey. This is a new experience. What surprises me is the my General External Receptor Camera has rich black and white output. May be it is because it lacks anti-alias filter.

Will be shooting Okinawa in Black and White and see for the next few days.

BTW, I tried some street photo in B/W, due to my skill, the people all looks very tired, so I don't want to post pictures which I don't like. Will try next time.

Some New Tricks

Finally, I have a few days of break during my hectic travel schedule. It was my wife's birthday yesterday. We had our usual dinner at Chijmes. Recently I have been revisiting a very well know photographer who uses Leica gear and his web has so much information not on how the camera performs, but on how to get certain look and picture. His web site is www.overgaard.dk. Yes, he is a Danish photographer, from a nice country which is peaceful and happy.

His review , or accurately usage report on Lecia gears, e.g. Digilux 2 - push the price of used Digilux in ebay to its original selling price almost 10 years ago. His review on Leica M9 (I suppose he never used Leica M8 due to the complexity of Infra filter, 1.3x cropping factor etc) is not only a review, but contains so much information how to take picture with Leica. I list here just a few thoughts. 

Firstly, he said aperture is not to control the amount of light, but the depth of field. You use shutter speed to control the amount of light. He always uses his lens at its maximum aperture. I agree 100% because there is no need to buy f2.0 len when you only use it at f5.6. At f5.6 most lens can perform well, but at its maximum, even leica is still slightly soft with more distortions, but with other lens (with the exception of Zeiss and some old Japanese lens) maximum aperture mean almost useless. Good food for thought.

Secondly, he never uses auto ISO because with f2.0, ISO 800, he can almost capture everything indoor, sometimes at 1/8". When outdoor, he will set ISO to 200. Using 200 vs 160 for Leica M9 is for convenience of conversion in the mind rather have to figure 160/320/640 etc. it is always easier with 200/400/800. With the digital noise of Leica M9 at ISO 800 still very acceptable, there is no need to shoot at ISO 1600 with 1/16"while indoor. How he managed to shoot at such slow speed even when using 50mm len?

The trick is to set the camera to continuous shooting mode, then you can shoot at least 3 pictures in sequence. This not only give you choices of slight change in background and facial expression, it also can get a sharp picture once out of 3 times with a bit of luck, therefore shooting at 1/8" is never an issue. 

So far so good! Lastly, do not us auto white balance. When outdoor, set the white balance to day light under the sun, under shade etc. If the color balance is off, it is very difficult to set it right using software. He always carries a white card in case of complicated color temperate and set the camera to manual white balance. While indoor, always set the white balance to tungsten. 

Here is a result of all the above put together.

White balance, tungsten. Shutter speed, 1/8", aperture f2.0 ( a very old canon leica screw mount len), ISO 800. I shot with continuous mode, 4 were take, one is sharp. So it is the only shot which is worth while to keep. The picture is as good as it can be, I am afraid without the knowledge from Overgaard's web, I could either use flash, or use ISO 1600, auto white balance - the end result could be very yellowish, with a lot of noise, and the facial expression may be a bit stiff. People tends to relax after the first shot, then it is the best time for the shot, but digital camera will need to recycle , store the first shot, ends up missing the second shot. Try for yourself, anyone of my friends who need to shot some portrait in low light. You will be amazed.