Panachallenge 2nd Place -- Amanda

I entered one of my images from the first Crombie McNeill / Barrett Palmer Models shoot into a challenge at Panachallenge.com, a challenge site (duh!) I used to frequent a great deal.

I got so into that site at one point that I was driven to try to lead the open category in every possible statistic. It took a bit of time, but I accomplished that and have led now for a couple of years.


About a year ago I won "Passageways" (challenge #45) with the following image, shot during a trip to London in May of 2008. We were descending one night into one of the tube stations, probably in the business district, and I thought the curved passage looked cool. By a fluke, this timing coincided with the entry period for Passageways.


And a little luck allowed me to enter challenge #61, "Interaction" with this image (entitled "The Breakup" ) from the Aylmer shoot:


I really like this image, and I frankly thought it deserved to win. I was a tad worried about one other image, a decent photograph of two people at a carnival, but otherwise I felt fairly safe. That image took a perplexing 10th by the way.

I had, of course, forgotten the fact that people do not vote with their heads, only with their hearts. This shows up with the number of cutsie images that win, like cats and dogs and kids etc.

I also got some disturbing comments ... someone said it looked contrived and artificial (what, snapshots only?) and someone else suggested that people are no longer interacting after a breakup (huh?)

Well, my image took 2nd place, which would normally be a cause for celebration. And it isn't the fact that I was beaten. It's the fact that I was beaten by a snail interacting with a happy face drawn in ink on the end of a finger :-/


I know that I sound ungrateful, but I will be wearing a figurative bag over my head for a week ... :-)

Nick's European Tour -- Video Call from Munich

Nick called me from an Internet cafe in Munich a short while ago ... we spent a few minutes chatting about his time there. He visited Dachau yesterday, one of three remaining gas chambers used by the Nazis. He took a train there and was guided by a nice fellow who does this all the time.

Apparently, Dachau was designed to hold 6,000 political prisoners in 1933, but by the time the allies liberated them, there are approximately 66,000 there. The rooms were small and had to hold 500 people, so they slept on top of each other. The weakest were placed at the bottom, and approximately 500 people suffocated across the whole camp some nights.


He walked through one of these rooms and through the gas chamber, and said that he felt physically ill. The psychological torture was also horrible ... months of waiting for paperwork between being notified of punishment and actually having it; being forced to choose between running into the escape zone to pick up a hat that was tossed by the SS or being punished for not wearing your hat (could result in death) ... this was one of the SS's favorite sports. Many such things ... it really brings home the brutality of that period in our collective history.

He was only able to recover with the help of a pub crawl. He is off to Amsterdam tomorrow ... my guess is that he will be feeling a whole lot more mellow in 24 hours ....

Crombie McNeill Workshop with Barrett Palmer Models Mk II

Today, I am off to another of Crombie McNeill's workshops with models supplied by Barrett Palmer Models. This one will take place in the town of Cumberland at the Heritage Village Museum. Here is the City of Ottawa description:

Costumed interpreters recreate what rural life was like in the 1920s and 1930s.

Cumberland Heritage Village Museum consists of 28 buildings on 25 hectares in the village of Cumberland. On site you will find seven houses and six buildings depicting residential and agricultural architecture and public buildings such as a one-room schoolhouse, fire hall, church and community hall. You can also visit a Canadian National railway station and caboose, a working sawmill and an Imperial garage.

The weather looks awful ... another cloudy day with storms predicted, so I imagine we'll shoot indoors a lot. I've decided to bring a light stand, umbrella and two flashes to help out just in case. But I have not practiced with these on location and so I don't want to slow myself down too much ... we'll see I suppose.

Fuji F70EXR -- High ISO in HR Mode -- How good is it?

I remain tempted by this cam, but the examples on the net so far are not fantastic. Still, for a small sensor it looks like 800 ISO is going to be quite decent. Even shot in HR mode, it is not bad.

1600 ISO on the other hand, looks bloody awful when shot in HR mode. Same issue as the F50fd et al ... photosites overwhelmed and the result is a massive blue cast over everything.

I found some images at this site with which I could explore the detail available. I checked 200 ISO as the benchmark, and then 800 and 1600. There is definitely a threshold effect at 1600 ISO ... noise spikes hugely. I am looking forward to some decent examples appearing on the net in SN mode. But for now, that model image in my last post is about all I've seen.

There are crops available on the original site, so I am not going to repeat those. What I've done is treated the images with Topaz Denoise, a high-grade noise reduction plugin that takes about 5 minutes to clean an image. It is really good at leaving detail while smoothing areas without texture.

Here are the crops for these images, showing that 800 ISO retains highlight detail well, and has tolerable detail remaining in the dark areas as seen in the shutter mechanism in the middle of the lens.


That's some kind of color cast, eh? Edit: I should be clear that this is not quite how they look on the site. I set white balance in ACR from the table, which I take to be white. It is accurate at 200 ISO, so it should be accurate all the way up.

Another thing I've done to these images is clean out the rather high CA. The sad fact is that this is Fuji's newest lens and, not only have they not cured CA, it looks like it is rather rampant :-)


To be fair, this might be purple fringing, but I don't think that'll make me feel any better when it shows up. Expanding the view in photoshop eventually gets up to pixel view, which allows one to count the 19 or so pixel width on the worst spot.


But Shay Stephens' CA Remover plugin continues to perform well for me. So I suppose I could tolerate it should the rest prove to be exciting.

I did a quick processing job on these three (converting the 1600 ISO image to B&W) and they came out pretty good.


That was 200 ISO, which looks quite clean. 800 ISO coming up looks almost as good at this size, but there is less detail in the shutter mechanism.


And finally, the master of disaster ... 1600 ISO. Not good, but remember that this is HR mode. So 1600 ISO on such a tiny sensor is hopeless ... I'll reserve final judgement until I see someone posting samples shot in SN mode. (Beats me why these are 10mp images ...)


Edit: Let me be clear ... this is a *tiny* sensor ... has to be to get that range in the lens ... so this 1600 ISO result in HR mode is not half bad. Few vendors could approach this result from a compact with no RAW capability ...

Fuji F70EXR -- Tempting!

When I went looking for a new concert cam last year, Fuji weren't making anything too interesting. They came out with the F200EXR and I wasn't very excited. Awful video, images that looked nice but weren't earth-shattering, really confusing feature interactions, that kind of thing.

But now they have announced a version with a smaller EXR sensor and a very long zoom, 27mm to 270mm! This one has me tempted ... very long reach, potentially decent 800 ISO and a very compact body.

Don't get me wrong ... the Canon G10 is an incredible camera. I love its video and I love its resolution. 15mp at 80 ISO will take your breath away ... literally. The problem is its size. Until Fuji announced this little cam, they had nothing with sufficient features to even tempt me.

So how does it perform? Well, as luck would have it, images have been posted on the net. In this post I will just give overall impressions. In the next one I will try to analyze image quality at all ISOs. Unfortunately, the series that has been posted so far shows only HR mode ... I want to see how SN mode works ... the high ISO binning mode at 5mp. Much more interesting in my opinion.

So I was able to find a nice image of a model shot in moderate light with deep shadow. This is an interesting test of how it reacts to post processing. So here is the original model image.


That's pretty decent, although on a calibrated monitor with a reasonable white point the shadows look a little dark. On my other monitor (cheap Samsung 1080p), they look fine. But the image looks a tad noisy.

Here are a couple of crops from the bright and dark areas showing how well the little cam holds details.


Pretty darned well I think ... especially in the lighter parts. Pretty decent 800ISO for a tiny sensor. Note, though, that this is a 5mp image, in other words it was shot in the sensor's best (binning) mode.

I processed the image with a slight beauty touch to get this:


I think that looks ok (click through to see the larger versions.) So my temptation remains ... it will obviously not compete with larger sensors, but it might just be good enough.

Another thing that excites me is what appears to be improvements in video. Same old (yuck) codec, but it appears to zoom and the image quality is decent. I wonder how the microphone will work at a concert. The G10 is amazing, but the F11 gets crushed by bass overload.

Here's a video that is apparently shot with this cam showing what I mean. It even appears that it might be stabilized somewhat (although not as good as the G10 for sure.)

Vince Mira sounds just like Johnny Cash

Vince Mira was apparently discovered on a street corner singing Johnny Cash songs. He is so similar that John Carter Cash was freaked out by him.

I stumbled on Vince while reading John Keatley's excellent blog on his portrait shoots and how he lights them. He is a master of adding light to create natural looking images that look incredible when shot at low ISO with medium format digital backs. Serious business with 10s of thousands in equipment. Well worth reading someone who can do that stuff ...

He shot Vince in Seattle for an article by James Ross Gardner called Vince Mira Won't Walk the Line. I believe the gist is that Vince will be giving up the Johnny Cash mimic business and working on his own music. He certainly sounds great and should be able to make a go of it. The blog entry for that is good reading. Here is an image from that blog entry, obviously copyright John Keatley ... and you can click through to his blog.


Here is a video of his visit with Ellen DeGeneres ... he sings Ring of Fire and you MUST hear this! He starts singing about 40% of the way in if you are impatient. And she gives him a Gibson Hummingbird right near the end if you go in for that sort of thing.