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Back in February Hywel said he’d do an updated gear list for the site. I’ve just been looking for it, and haven’t been able to find it. Did it ever get uploaded, or is it just well hidden?
Ah… oopsie (to quote Ariel). I never got around to it. I’ll do it this month.
Cheers, Hywel.
And please let us know where you put it: I haven’t been able to find a non-updated list either.
… I’d already taken the old one down because it was so woefully out of date, but for reference I’ve just reinstated it:
http://www.restrainedelegance.com/members/gal.php?id=806
I’ll do the new one in a week or two, must finish processing sets for next month first!
Cheers, Hywel.
@hywel wrote:
I’ll do the new one in a week or two, must finish processing sets for next month first!
OK. Important things first. 😀
Thanks for the updated RE kit list. The most useful part for me was the list of most-commonly-used lenses, since a full frame dSLR is beyond my budget (to say nothing of the Hasselblad).
I’ve had a few point-and-shoot cameras over the years, starting with the Olympus C3000 back when 3 megapixels was hot stuff. At Fetish Con this year, I caught a bad case of dSLR lust. My Panasonic FZ28 was a good camera for outside-in-daylight, but not so much for indoors. Using the advice from this “kit list” http://www.luvbight.com/fetish/handouts/budget-photo.html helped, but I still wanted better.
I waited a month for the envy to die down, but it didn’t – and now I’m a new owner of a Nikon D90. (Still more than I was planning to pay, but it felt so nice in my hands.) I also picked up the 35mm f1.8 lens, along with the kit lens that came with the Nikon. Now I have to learn how to use them. (Along with the flash I intend to pick up.)
HI,
Glad it was of some use.
For stills photos of people, I’d always go for the two primes combination of a standard lens (around 50 mm full-frame 35mm equivalent, so a 35 mm lens does the same job on an APS-sized sensor, and an 80 mm lens on the Hasselblad) and a mild telephoto portrait lens (85 mm full frame, or 50 mm on APS, or 120 on the Hasselblad).
For a third lens the slightly wider than standard but not too wide option is OK if you REALLY need to get full length shots in enclosed spaces.
So my essential kit would always be 35/50/85 mm prime lenses, plus a wide angle zoom if you do lots of landscapes and/or a telephoto zoom if you do lots sports/wildlife shots. Fixed maximum aperture lenses almost invariably perform better than variable aperture lenses (because it is expensive to engineer them that way, and consequently they do a good job and sell them for 5 times the price).
The primes are lighter, generally MUCH faster and therefore brighter (using an f/4-5.6 kit zoom after having an f/1.4 prime on your camera is like someone turned out the lights) and are optimised for great results at just focal length.
Zooms are invariably compromised SOMEWHERE in the focal length range, and my experience is that they tend to “extremeitis” as well. Instead of moving, the photographer uses the zoom to recompose and only moves if he cannot get the shot within the zoom’s range. Having got the zoom at maximum wide angle, he’ll then take the smallest possible step back to get it all in- whereas a much more flattering shot for models is likely to come from standing a lot further away and having the focal length somewhere between 50 mm and 85 mm (full frame equivalent). This leads to unflattering perspectives, and also taxing use of the zoom. Zooms usually perform badly towards the extremes at one end, sometimes both ends- if it was designed to do a superlative job at 28 mm, the designers would probably have squeezed it down and extended it to 24 mm with
acceptable performance as well.It is well worth getting to know your lenses with lots of shooting, or taking a short cut and looking at the lens’ MTF chart or, even better, something like the DP review lens tests.
For example, here is the lens test for my 50 mm prime on a full frame camera:
http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/canon_50_1p4_c16/page5.aspNote that at f/1.4 the whole graph is orange, with a hint of green at the centre. That means pretty soft performance especially at the edges- which is bourne out by our experience that the lens is really soft and dreamy wide open.
Stop down to around f/6.3 though, which is a typical value for our studio shoots and the lens is phenomeninally sharp everywhere- the chart is blue all over, comfortably out-resolving their test sensor and probably any other 35 mm dSLR sensor money can buy. If you want clear, clean, sharp results, that 50 mm prime at f/6.3 is absolutely a honey.
By contrast a cheap Canon kit zoom lens like this one:
http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/canon_18-55_3p5-5p6_is_c16/page3.aspat 55 mm never gets much better than the prime was wide open, even stopped down to its optimum which is around f/11, and you can see that the performance at 55 mm is definitely not as good as at 35 mm.
I’d suggest some practice shooting with just the prime. It takes a while to get used to having to move about so much to compose your shot, but the discipline imposed by a single focal length is really good, and I’m sure you’ll find the lens a hell of a lot crisper than the kit lens.
Cheers, Hywel.
P.S. interesting article by Mick and a good “kit list” for people maybe just dabbling for the first time.
Personally I’d recommend a dSLR with full manual control and interchangeable lenses over a compact every time, unless it is one of those rare compacts with a good lens and full manual control. If you are in any way serious about your photography, the money spent on a compact camera is just a non-refundable hundred pound plus deposit on the dSLR you will one day buy (to steal Stu Maschwitz’ neat turn of phrase). One can get a second hand 350D or 10D for comparable prices on eBay.
The quality of the glass on the front is hugely important, probably more so than the camera behind it, especially if you have any intention of doing photography for more than a year or two. The lenses will all be in use a decade after your first camera body has been retired, so don’t scrimp here as you’ll only end up buying decent glass sooner or later.
I’d also probably recommend a cheap studio flash kit over continuous light, if stills are your passion, but if you think you may want video as well, continuous light is the way to go. It is also much cheaper as you can definitely start with some work lights from the DIY shop and some big white reflectors, which is super cheap by comparison with even the cheapest flash setup.
If you do get some sort of Speedlight flash, see if you can get one which wirelessly syncs with the camera- one that will let you use it as an off-camera flash. This will give you the ability to use the flash as a key light off axis, with the camera’ built in flash (maybe fired through a sheet of tissue paper) as a fill light and will give much better results than powerful on-camera flash. The addition of a second speedlight at a later date will give you a go-anywhere, portable, battery powered three point lighting kit. The only things it won’t do is fill halls with light or recharge quickly.
Cheers, Hywel.
OTOH, compact cameras have the advantage of being compact. What they lack from my point of view is low ambient light performance and the ability to use bigger (and off-camera) flash units.
I’ve noticed that with entry-level dSLRs, the second lens they try to sell you is a telephoto zoom (out to 200 or 300mm or so). That’s the opposite of the way I wanted to go.
I did get a speedlight between my last post and your response – an sb600 which can be used wirelessly off-camera with the d90. Also a cheap ($30) stand & umbrella kit. I haven’t tried out any off-camera stuff, but I have played around with a few “bounce the flash off the ceiling” tricks.
I noticed that you didn’t say “get a light meter!” in this thread. 🙂
Yeh, since even a lot of compacts can now display histograms, light meters are less useful than they used to be. I still use one to set up lights so I can balance the lighting ratios to my taste. But it is fine to shoot RAW and expose to the right- make sure your histogram fills up as far towards the right hand edge as you can without clipping any highlight detail you want to keep. Then in the RAW development phase in Aperture/Lightroom/Adobe Camera Raw/whatever software your manufacturer supplies, you can tone down the level to suit the mood of the original shot. This maximises the information captured by the camera and delivers the best shadow detail and lowest noise, whilst not losing highlight detail at the top end.
One thing you do have to watch with that way of shooting is cameras that don’t highlight clipping in the image display properly, because you might find you’ve accidentally clipped small but vital highlights on the model’s skin or something. So, although really one should try to avoid wasting all the huge dynamic range in the top half stop of the camera’s exposure, I’d still tend to err on the side of underexposing by a third of a stop for safety if I’m at all concerned about anything clipping.
If shooting JPEG, you really want to get the exposure spot on. Eight bits of dynamic range and tonal information is fine if they are the right eight bits but the moment you start manipulation anything to do with brightness, exposure, contrast or tone curve in post, you’ll really start to play havoc with the rendition. Which is the reason why you should always shoot RAW unless you have huge, news-reporter-like time pressure on shot delivery.
Cheers, Hywel.
Now you tell me. 🙁 Even my FZ28 point-and-shoot can do RAW, but I hadn’t been using RAW mode because I didn’t understand the advantages of doing so.
If your camera can shoot RAW, shoot RAW from this moment on 😉
You will need to add an additional step in processing the images to “develop” the RAW images, but there’s choices… The free software provided by your camera manufacturers, a front-end program like Adobe Camera RAW for Photoshop (and probably Photoshop Elements as well I guess?) or a dedicated PIEware RAW program like Lightroom or Aperture… any one of these will do the job.
The idea is that the camera records the full data straight of the sensor and doesn’t have to make any decisions at all about what to do with that data in real time. So you can freely mess about with things like contrast, picture style, tone curve and white balance offline, instead of “baking those settings in” at shooting time like you do when shooting in JPEG. You’ve got more information to play with.
You still need to get the exposure right, so that the sensor makes the most of its sensitivity and dynamic range without clipping the highlights- that’s why we expose to the right on the histogram. But once you’ve done that, most of the other artistic choices can be made later at leisure with a large version of the image on a (hopefully) calibrated computer screen.
It is a bit slower and more laborious getting the final image shooting RAW, which is why news guys may still shoot JPEG. Although even they may be shooting RAW+JPEG these days as most cameras can do that. Gives you the speed of having JPEGs but also writes the RAW so you can go back to them and do more image processing of the select images from the batch if you need to.
The reason we shot JPEG for years, incidentally, was just to do with data volume. RAW files are big, so big that even the enterprise-class rack mount data store I had for a few years couldn’t have kept up with the huge data volume. Storage has just about got cheap enough now that shooting in RAW is feasible for us. I wish we’d shot in RAW from day one, but no use crying over spilt milk… just start doing so right now and never take another photo where you don’t at least shoot RAW+JPEG and archive the RAW somehow.
Cheers, Hywel.
On the subject of clipping and Histograms, its definitely worth finding out just what your camera shows, As the D70 show’s Luma (or the green channel) on its histogram and the highlights view, so it is easily possible to clip one of the RGB channels (Particularly red) without it showing that at all. On the D700, The RGB highlights view seems to be showing Luma instead of Combined RGB (It does however have a proper RGB histogram view though which is more helpfull). This has caught me out a couple of times…
I’ve ended up getting some Speedlights (With various ultra-light light formers) which seem to work well. The recharge isn’t too bad a couple of stops down (unless you shoot very fast, I can imagine that you would find it frustrating Hywel!). The only thing that has really annoyed me so far is that the D700 will only control the level of 2 groups of flashes. There seems to be no way to set flash levels on the units directly when in remote mode, so it can be a juggle sometimes to balance a 3 flashes when two units have to be set at the same brightness! Still, at 3kg for a 3 point flash set (Minus the stands of course), You can’t beat them for portability.
Having been carrying a couple of f2.8 zoom lenses around for the last month, Prime lenses are much much lighter! To the extent that I have started taking a 50mm prime out on day trips and just living with the chosen focal length.
For my normal low light shooting however, I am really loving the F2.8 70-200mm VRII. Which I would happily shoot with in a studio too if space permits. I love the really shallow depth of field it gives me, However its closest focus distance is miles away.
I also found a use for tethered shooting! Did a food shoot last week, with the number of people involved in each shot, And the minute adjustments needed with the lighting, food and shooting position. Shooting tethered actually sped the process up! Definitely a new experience for me. (Though not as fun as shooting bondage obviously! But good none the less). For my first food shoot, I’m quite please with the results. Still a fair amount of editing to do though…
[attachment=0:gdzlaz9p]cake-206.jpg[/attachment:gdzlaz9p]
[attachment=1:gdzlaz9p]food-177.jpg[/attachment:gdzlaz9p]
If you have just bought a new camera, one thing I highly recommend would be:
If you are planning to take a photo holding the camera above your head. Always look up, and check there are no big metal ceiling fans spinning just above your head! It made a pretty impressive noise, but the fan came out far better than the camera… It’s now in the repair shop….
Oh, you b*st*rd… I’m on a diet (grrrrrr) and those food shots look DELICIOUS!!!
🙂 🙂 🙂
I tried shooting tethered recently for a technically similar (but much less tasty-looking) shoot of a toy soldier army, it does help a lot to have the shots appear right there in glorious technicolour on a big screen to make tweaks.
Don’t think it is feasible to shoot tethered at the moment for our RE shoots- too much moving around- but roll on the day when the data rates are good enough for us to shoot Wifi tethered to a system which automatically backs up all the shots to multiple external drives as you take them… that will be absolutely the answer. I think maybe Nikon and maybe Canon have systems like that already…
Hywel.
Lurker, I’m certainly not much of a photographer but, as far as I can tell, the articles at http://www.ronbigelow.com are fairly good and easy to follow. Several deal with post processing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just make a raid to the kitchen.
I’m not on a diet! 😉Martes
@hywel wrote:
I think maybe Nikon and maybe Canon have systems like that already…
FWIW, there’s http://www.eye.fi/ Is that what you were thinking of?
Apologies Hywel, I’ll try to post something less tempting next time… (Hmm, and as I’ve been eating that food for a couple of months now, I should probably be on that diet too…!)
Yeah, Nikon do a WifI tether system, I looked at it, but as it is a belt pack with a lead to the camera, I can see dangers when you put the camera down and then walk off forgetting that it is wired to your belt!
Shooting tethered with Lighting Room seemed a very slow process. Take a photo, wait 15+ seconds for it to load said photo… then A bit more for it to generate full preview… Maybe with Nikon capture it is has a more responsive experience, (or maybe my mac book is show signs of its 3+ years age), I would have thought for the RE style of shooting where you have limited time to take photo’s, waiting for images to appear on a computer wouldn’t be ideal… The automatic backup idea is nice though.
Cheers,
Sheep
Hi, What do you use for Screen Calibration?
Cheers,
Sheep
I have a rather ancient Spyder calibrator which seems to do the job; as far as I can see any one of the similar product (Pantone Huey, etc) should do the job. As we’re not aiming at print as our final output, colour calirabtion is a bit less critical for us than for other graphics professionals, so this isn’t an area I’ve devoted too much time to.
Most people viewing our pics will presumably be doing so on an uncalibrated monitor, probably with settings right out of the box, with unknown brightness, contrast and colour balance settings… so the best we can do is hope that they somehow turn out around sRGB on average, and calibrate for that as our target.
Cheers, Hywel.
I just watched the “Elle tied to the bed” tutorial-video again, and I’d like to know: Are the future tutorials that will “cover the details of apertures, ISOs, f-stops, lighting ratios and all that…” still in your plans?
HI,
Sort-of, and yes. 😀
We cover them in the “real life” bondage photo tutorials, obviously. Some things like that are very easy to demonstrate in a practical situation, but require more pedagogical thought to get across in remote learning contexts.
One of my hopes is to put together a much more coherent video-plus-slideshow/narration tutorial series for the site, but it will take considerable time, effort and thought to get it right… and I’ve not managed to do that yet. We’ll see how things go next year- I’m hoping to have freed up enough Hywel hours a month to be able to tackle projects like that!
Cheers, Hywel.
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