The main difference between these formats is the sensor size. See table below for translation hints on that 🙂

The difference between Canon and Nikon is more subtle. For me, the main difference is in the colour science. I like the way Canons (and Hasselblad) render colours, especially skin tones. I find getting skin tones the way I like them out a Nikon to be more of a challenge, but that’s probably because I very rarely have any Nikon sets to process so I’m not used to it.

Traditionally, sports and wildlife photographers were 100% Nikon and studio photographers were 100% Canon (or Medium Format). These days the divisions are much less clear-cut, with Canon pushing Nikon on the high ISO and autofocus and Nikon pushing Canon on the pixel count and detail. (The new Nikon flagship can even be specified without an anti-alias filter, a distinctly chancy prospect unless you know what you are doing and therefore traditionally the domain of the studio photographers).

It is fair to say that other manufacturers are minor players in the professional market, although Sony in particular has made considerable inroads with their newer cameras. Here the main issue is the system support. If you can imagine a lens or gadget for the camera system, Nikon and Canon will have it (up to and including ludicrous glass like this 600mm f/4: http://www.warehouseexpress.com/buy-canon-ef-600mm-f4-l-is-ii-usm-lens/p1523948).
If you choose a Sony or a Pentax, you might not be so lucky.

There’s also been a real revolution in non-SLR interchangeable lens cameras, with Four Thirds cameras from Panasonic and Olympus leading the pack (and Nikon and Fuji getting into the game). Because they don’t have to have a pentaprism and mirror system, these can pack a big sensor into a small camera, which makes for fabulous travel cameras with full manual control. I’ve got a Panasonic GF1 which I love for general shooting, although its image quality isn’t up there with a Hasselblad, it is better to have a camera in your pocket that you then use than a splendid one you always leave at home.

For lenses, the key parameters are field of view and maximum aperture. The field of view is determined by the combination of the lens’ focal length and the size of sensor you’re using it on. A 50mm lens is a 50 mm lens whatever sensor you put behind it, but the smaller the sensor you have, the less of the scene it can see. So an APS-C sensor sized camera (DX, for Nikon guys) effectively crops out the middle bit of the image a full frame version of the camera would see. The net effect is called the “crop factor”, but that seems to confuse people.

The bottom line for people photography is that you probably want a slightly wide angle (not too wide or it’ll be unflattering), a normal lens that gives the “natural” perspective, and a portrait lens (short telephoto).

The determining factor in the lens’ cost is usually the maximum aperture. This determines how much light the lens lets in (and as a side-effect, how shallow a depth of field you can get). A “fast” lens like an f/1.4 prime lets in a lot more light than a “slow” zoom like a f/4. (Eight times more light, in this case). That lets you shoot in lower light, gives you a brighter viewfinder image, and gives you more artistic choices. Primes are almost always faster than zooms, and are also designed for maximum sharpness at one focal length rather than being compromised for several, which is why most studio photographers stick to primes. On the other hand, being able to shoot without changing lenses is an absolute requirement for some sorts of photography, so choose according to what you think you’ll be doing.

This boils down to:
Four Thirds (crop factor 2)
Wide: 14-20mm
Normal: 25 mm
Portrait: 45 mm
APS-C/DX (crop factor around 1.5/1.6)
Wide: 28 mm
Normal: 35 mm
Portrait: 50 mm
Full frame 35 mm (crop factor 1)
Wide: 35 mm
Normal: 50 mm
Portrait: 85 mm
Medium Format (crop factor around 0.7)
Wide: 50 mm
Normal: 80 mm
Portrait: 120 mm

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi All,

Well, it looks like the forum has just got reinvograted, so when I have chance I will move to more spam-proof software and reorganise into select sub-forums as lurker suggests.

Thanks for suggestions for the shoot with Frankie. What actually happened on the day is typical, and explains why it is going to be a bit of wrench for me to start talking more openly about forthcoming shoots.

Frankie arrived early (YAY!) and was ready to go (double YAY!) after a cuppa and a quick pre-production meeting chat. We had four stills ideas planned, and three videos, one of which was Bob20’s idea.

We got the stills sets wrapped by lunchtime, so swapped over to video for the afternoon. I had planned out the first video in some detail (camera plots, storyboard sketch, etc.) so obviously that was the one we tackled first. I had originally planned to shoot the first two with the old Panasonic video camera and pick up the new RED Scarlet for the final video, which I’d planned as a simple “metal bondage music video” as I knew I’d likely be spending longer than usual fannying about with the camera as it was its first outing. Metal bondage is great because you can let the model out for a break while you faff. I thought we could probably get through the three videos if I shot the first two with a camera I knew.

But of course the excitement and the lure of luscious digitial cinema got to me, and we were doing OK for time, so I shot the first video with the RED. It took sufficiently long that we didn’t have enough time left at the end of the day to shoot another multi-location video (every time you move location, you incur a minimum of 15 minutes to move all the kit and light the new space).

So we ended up shooting just my first idea and the metal music video, because we didn’t have time left for Bob20’s suggestion.

Which makes me feel bad, because I had gone into the shoot with every intention of shooting it, but it just didn’t work out that way.

I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE promising things I don’t deliver. So from the earliest days of the site I’ve had a strict policy of not announcing anything unless it was already in the bag. I think that makes me come over as un-enthusiastic, non-committal and cold. 🙁 🙁 🙁

I hope it has stopped me coming over as a liar or a con-man who promises stuff he doesn’t deliver.

Anyway, at the end of all that verbiage, there’s a simple question to you guys.

Would you prefer me to change my policy, and be more open about what we have in the works? The considerable upside is that you can all have a much greater input, have things to look forward to and can write suggestions for concrete ideas with specific models and locations in mind.

The downside is that I will not be able to deliver on everything we discuss- sometimes entire shoots or trips get changed, rearranged or dropped entirely. Models quit, or move to L.A. more often than you might think, and everyone gets ‘flu from time to time.

Sometimes we get to a location and discover the fabulous castle we had planned has rooms like shoeboxes and we’d do much better shooting in the fields behind it and pretending it was Africa (that happened at a week-long shoot a couple of years ago!)

Or, like on Thursday’s shoot with Frankie, we plan for more than we shoot. Normally I just put the plan back into the pot for the next shoot- but the person suggesting it might be disappointed if they’ve suggested it for their fave model and we end up shooting it with someone else?

We can be more open about our plans, but I don’t want to disappoint people.

So… would you be happy with a “collegiate agreement” that all plans and discussions are on the understanding that no plan survives the first ten minutes of the shoot? That we’ll do our best to make a sexy and fun shoot incorporating as many suggestions as we can, whatever happens on the day, but that we can’t promise to shoot things as though they were custom shoots?

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi Bob20,

Good idea! I don’t want to specify dates for shoots (I’m always cautious giving away any details about models in semi-public forums, I know a few girls have had troubles with stalkers in the past) but I could certainly outline who we are hoping to shoot in the next few months and the location we’re planning to shoot… will post some threads about it next week.

To get the ball rolling, we’re hoping to shoot with Frankie, at the house, shortly. So available rooms are a bedroom, stairs and landing, living room, dining room, kitchen, white studio and black studio. “Unusual” kit that’s around or assembled at the moment includes the square cage, the steel bondage pole, and the ancient looking wooden stocks. Plus all the rope, metal work, gags, etc..

So any ideas or suggestions appreciated- I’ll flesh this out a bit next week with pictures of the various rooms etc.

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi Lurker,

The new sets are always at the start. I’ll try to remember to put in a division, as in the edited post above.

Cheers, Hywel.

P.S.

If you’re thinking that we’ve already got something of a profusion of blogs and twitter feeds and hardly need another one, I’ll agree with you. If we go the blog+comments route, I’d want to streamline and aggregate so that the news pages, my blog, Ariel’s blog, the twitter feeds etc are all sensibly organised and accessible from one central switchyard page, so there would only be one place you ever needed to check to see what’s new and what the latest things going on are.

Hywel.

Hi,

Many thanks to everyone who popped in to the chat session last night! We got some great ideas for our movies and Steve and Ariel and working away to incorporate them and flesh out the storylines to shooting scripts 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

HI Jeff,

Hope you had a great Xmas and hope you have a good New Year!

Thank you for all your kind words and contributions. It is a pleasure working with great people on RE, whether on set or on the forum talking about ideas, so thank you and everyone else who posts on the forum, too!

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi J.C.,

Here are my thoughts on the first set of photos.

Cheers, Hywel.

I like the overall look and feel a lot. It is very effective to start with the shot of the empty room and the drawer full of bondage gear and ropes, I think that sets the story nicely. The model is pretty and she does some good expressions in bondage, which is always the first thing I look for! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Add that to a nice storyline construction and we get the feeling we are looking at a girl coming to a hotel room for a sexy bondage experience. The bondage is fine although personally I’d hide a few trailing rope ends so she can’t get hold of them! So the essential elements are well sorted.

On the technical side, you’ve done a good job balancing the light levels inside and outside the room, which can be pretty tricky with such a bright sunlit day. Unfortunately, to achieve this you’ve had to stop the lens down a lot, which has resulted in everything outside the window being sharply in focus.

So in the shots of her tied in the chair with the window behind it is hard to keep our attention on her, because there is so much busy detail behind her. To counteract this, have a play with shooting with the lens much wider open (f/3.5 I think your lens will go to, whereas shot 139 for example was taken at f/6.5) and use a short shutter speed to compensate (which may be limited by the sync speed of the flash you are using but some cameras can sync to very short speeds with their dedicated flash units). Also turn the ISO down as low as it will go- I think the background would look less busy at f/3.5 and ISO 100 rather than f/6.5 and ISO 400.

Focus generally looks like it is worth paying attention to- both in terms of where the viewer’s eye will rest in the shot, and what parts of the shot should be in sharp focus. Usually, unless you’ve made the specific decision to focus elsewhere, you should make sure that the model’s eyes are sharp (the rule is the eye closest to the camera should be usually be sharp, if you’re shooting with very shallow depth of field). There’s a few shots where I think the camera’s autofocus may have chosen to focus on something a bit non-ideal eg shot 100 where her dress seems to be sharper than her eyes. We usually turn the camera to use just its central focus point, use that to focus on her eyes, then recompose the shot holding down the shutter button so the focus stays the same, then shooting.

The other thing that I noticed was a bit all over the place was the white balance, with her white dress looking very blue in some shots and quite green in others. Some of this will be colour casts from the scene outside, but I wonder if the camera was on auto white balance? We usually find it better to choose daylight balance because then it is the same from shot to shot. Ideally of course, shoot RAW and make the white balance decision when you are processing and can see the differences rather than baking this choice into the file “blind” when you shoot.

The shots which didn’t use flash have a bit of camera shake- not surprising as they were presumably hand held at 1/40th of a second. Here’s where it would have helped to have ISO 400 or even higher- there’s a trade off between noise softening the image and getting a sharp picture from a decent shutter speed. I try never to shoot slower than 1/200th of a second if I possibly can and will turn the ISO up to allow me to do this.

I think it is a very good beginning. The most important things – a nice setting, a pretty girl, the feeling that there is a story behind the pictures, decent bondage, and good expressions from the girl- were all in place. This first set of photos probably relied a lot on auto settings on the camera, at a guess? The main thing to do now is to improve the technical quality of each image- they are well composed and well thought out, just need to figure out a combination of lighting and camera settings to get each one as sharp as it should be and as well constructed to show what you want the viewer to take from the image as possible.

My main suggestion, as always, is to take the camera off auto and set everything manually. Make mistakes, see what shots look like at f/3.5 or f/11, 1/40th of a second or 1/200th, daylight white balance vs. playing with the shots as RAW in aperture afterwards, and generally get a feel for how you want your images to look and how to use the camera settings to achieve that!

Also decide if you are going to concentrate on available light, daylight only shots – in which case maybe consider buying a nice fast prime lens like a Canon 35 mm f/2 which will make shooting with no additional lighting rather easier- or whether you want to start constructing the look and the lighting, in which case investing in some studio flash units is probably more important than more glass. (Actually I’d advocate picking up a couple of fast primes in either case, personally I think the discipline of shooting with a fixed focal length lens, plus the superior optical quality, is very good for one’s photography. I’d get a 35mm f/2 and 50mm f/1.4 prime and learn the ins and outs of shooting with them sooner rather than later).

Cheers, Hywel.