Tag: depth of field

Camera manuals to go

Buried in a previous article, instead of carrying the paper manuals around, I mentioned that you should download your manufacturer’s camera manuals onto the iPhone for reference. But I didn’t explain how this could be done or why it is useful.

Here are three applications I’ve used that render PDFs:

Three apps: Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader

Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader

I’ll be talking about Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader. If you want to know the solution I use for camera manuals, skip to the section on GoodReader.

Continue reading about reading PDF manuals in Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader after the jump

Posted on by tychay 2

Live view aperture on the E-P2

Now that my E-P2 has finally found a jacket-pocketable lens, the 20mm f/1.7 pancake from Panasonic (purchase from Amazon or Roberts Imaging), I’ve been carrying it a lot more often.

E-P2 w/ 20mm f/1.7

E-P2 w/ 20mm f/1.7
San Francisco, California, USA

Nikon D3, 50mm f/1.4G
1/50 sec @ ƒ/2.2, iso 2500, 50mm

A 20mm f/1.7 lens and a Hirano case make the E-P2 an effective kit. If you want to pocket it, just unscrew the case and pop out the EVF.

One curious behavior I noticed while shooting is that the aperture is electronically controlled to make the CCD’s life easier in the camera live view—since this is an EVIL camera, it always has live view. When it’s quiet, you can hear the aperture click as you move it around to different lighting conditions. Furthermore, it never seems to set the aperture wider than about ƒ/2.8 unless you are autofocusing. This means when night shooting in the dark with this lens, it’s brighter than your eyes, but not as bright as the lens is actually capable of. Not only that, but the depth-of-field you see in the live view is independent of the final output.

I decided to take a video of the behavior with Marie’s D5000. Since I accidentally hit the shutter button while focusing, here is a still:

20/1.7 aperture

20/1.7 aperture
San Francisco, California, USA

Nikon D5000, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 DX VR
1/30 sec @ ƒ/7.1, iso 560, 55mm (78mm)

To get this photo, I jury rigged my D200 RRS L-bracket onto the D5000 so I could tripod mount it.

and here is the movie:

I’m just waving my hand in front of the lens a few times. And then I turn the camera off.

The overexposure was the camera’s decision. I didn’t have time to figure out how to keep the Auto ISO from overcompensating my setting.

Do any of you notice this behavior on the Panasonic GF-1?

Posted on by tychay 4

2010-01-16 Melanie’s Bday

From a previous article, I finally found a way to work in Aperture again. But since I’m also trying to pick up photography again, I thought it’d be fun to write a little bit showing a few experimental images taken from that day.

This will be a way to test out a new WordPress plugin I just wrote to do mouseovers. As long as you’re on this blog article, you can run your mouse over the image to see the pre-processed original image.

The specials are…

The specials are…
Mission Beach Cafe, The Mission, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P2, M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6
1/5sec @ ƒ3.9, iso 1600, 17mm (35mm)

I arrived a little late as usual, but just in time to order dinner with everyone else.

This was actually the first image I used to test out whether the workflow works. Because of that, the DNG output was 8-bit, not 16-bit. That may have accounted for the overaggressive smoothing, or it could be the lack of dynamic range in an ISO 1600 µ4:3 CMOS sensor (roughly 1/4 the size of a 35mm frame). Then again, maybe it’s the setting on Topaz Adjust plugin. In any case, it does have the painterly look that you get when you start remapping dynamic range of an image. Not too sure if I can still call this a photograph.

If you mouseover the image, you may be wondering how I pulled color from the black-and-white original. The original is the JPEG, but the image was generated from the RAW. For documentary photography, on cameras which resemble rangefinders like the Leica M8 and the Olympus E-P2, I prefer black-and-whites previews, which force me to concentrate on tone and not color—but it’s always nice to be able to grab the color channels from the RAW if I change my mind.

This exposure tests the outer-limits of the kit lens: 1/5 of a second at a borderline too-high-for-this-camera ISO at the largest aperture for this 35mm EFL. Had I my old 17mm pancake, I’d have gotten a full stop faster. Still, it got focus-lock and the in-body image stabilization allowed me to shoot handheld braced against elbows on the table. Yeah!

More photos in later pages…

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