DO NOT buy one of these...

{sigh}. 2:00 am again. I don't know where the day goes...

Waste of money
I always wanted to have a variable Neutral Density filter. Well at least since I saw one up in Wawa -- Brian Barker had one. His was made by Singh-Ray and cost about $350. Ron had a Lee system with a filter holder and several glass insert filters and that was substantially more money.

I researched and shopped around and found another source, a company called Fader and by most of the reviews I read, it wasn't bad. They ran about $120 on eBay and elsewhere, so I went shopping. What I found was another one made by POLAROID. Half the price! $55! How could I go wrong?

Well, I could have my $55 instead of a useless piece of glass.

First of all, I found out (after the fact, of course) that Polaroid isn't the Polaroid Corporation that we knew and loved. Somebody bought the name and sells the branding to unknown producers in the Far East.

The way these things work is to mount two polarizing filters so that they can rotate relative to one another. When they are at their maximum setting, you get as much as 10 stops attenuation. The same shot that you would have made at 1/60 second would be at 15 seconds or so! Think about the possibilities for waterfalls! For thunderstorms!

When you look at the filter, it appears to be well built. It has a useful collar on it, something I wish they would put on regular polarizing filters so you could turn them without overtightening them on the lens, and still be able to unscrew it when you need to. The thread is a bit fine so you have to be careful screwing it onto the lens but the build quality seems to be pretty good.

All good, until you try to take a picture with it.

First I tried it with my wide angle lens -- I have two lenses that it will fit without a step-up ring, my 12-24 and my 70-200. With the wide angle you get a huge interference pattern that looks like someone is holding a big black cross up in front of the lens. So I switched to the long lens.

The word "SOFT" does not even begin to describe the results I had with my first test. Focusing is difficult, etc etc but trust me when I say I set it up carefully. NOTHING is in focus. Exposure is hit and miss, but you can deal with that by bracketing. But folks, if I got a water glass from my kitchen and held it in front of the lens I'd get sharper pictures.

Maybe it wasn't a fair test. I'll go out today (if it stops raining) and try again. But I think I just bought myself a $55 coaster for under my coffee cup.

I guess I'll never learn. I have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk: DON'T BUY OFF BRAND STUFF. You will regret it.

If you're tempted to buy a cheap variable neutral density filter, stop and send the money to my PayPal account instead. It will be better spent if you just give it to me.

That said, I'll try again and try to get some documented pictures to show you next time.

Some other pictures:
Here are a couple of pictures I did on the weekend, while teaching the Motorcycle course at Humber. Both of them were enhanced using Topaz Adjust in Photoshop.

I don't normally take the camera out, I'm being paid to teach not shoot pictures. However, they asked me to get a few shots of the old guy. He was 87, getting his basic motorcycle license. Guess it was on his 'bucket list'! How can you NOT photograph that face?

This was one of my fellow instructors preparing the students for their license qualification test. I removed his name from the nametag on his hat. By the way, I was reflected in the left lens of his sunglasses. Can you say, "content aware fill"?

It rained all day today, including a couple of thunderstorms. It cleared up and quieted down around sunset and I got this shot. I know it's kind of ordinary, but it says a lot about why I live up here.

Next weekend, some friends are coming up to shoot Trilliums and other stuff, and maybe learn a thing or two about shooting HDR's (I know, I still haven't finished that article! Any Day Now!). Come join us. May 7/8 up in the Haliburton Highlands. Shoot me an email if you're thinking about coming up.

-- 30 --

Photo Workshop Survey

But first... has anyone been tuning into the new Kelby show, “The Grid”? It’s on live on Mondays at 12:30 noon, but I’ve missed it each time. A day later, it’s up on their site or iTunes (feh. Ptui, ptui).
The first one, two weeks ago, was entertaining and fun to watch. The one last week was really interesting. They talked about DSLR HD Video and I’ll let you watch it to see what they said; but they also talked about HDR and that was interesting. RC Concepcion pointed out that the real problem with HDR is that a lot of it out there is badly done. And that there’s a lot of post-processing to be done after you’ve created it and tweaked it. At one point they talked about it being a fad and I almost shouted out loud that Ansel Adams invented it, then RC said, “and guess who invented it? Ansel Adams!” I had that written in my HDR presentation BEFORE watching this. Ask Bob Fowler! We talked about it at a club meeting weeks ago!

They said a lot of good things about NIK HDR Efx Pro. Guess I have to add it to my shopping list. I'm waiting for my Humber College Staff ID so I can get my educational discount...

Go watch the Grid. Here: http://kelbytv.com/thegrid/. Episode 3 should be up there tomorrow, and they’re talking about microstock (Les..)

You don’t have to be a NAPP member to watch it. You really should be one, though: use this link if you’re thinking about joining.

I'm preparing some multi-part content for my technical post that will be directed at people who want to try some HDRs but don't know how to get started. It's not really difficult but you need to understand some basic concepts. I expect that will be ready, at least the first part, within this week. Stay tuned!

Photography Workshops

I've mentioned several times that we're working on some potential photography workshops and/or destination trips. Who's "we"?

Well I'm one of 'we'. I have some colleagues with whom I'm working, people who have considerable experience and skill sets both as photographers and as educators. We are like-minded: we think that we have a lot to offer to photographers of all levels, and that we can put together teams to present valuable sessions.

We have some ideas about what we'd like to do, but it would be really helpful to find out what our potential customers want. So to that end, I've put together a quick survey that should take you only a few minutes to complete. Please take a second to fill it out. Answer as many or as few questions as you wish.

PLEASE be honest. I know how tempting it is to be humourous or engage in wishful thinking, but we really would like to develop some workshops based on your responses.

We will NOT record your email addresses nor contact you because you filled out the survey, unless you want us to (one question is, "should we contact you?")

One of the questions on the survey asks if you know anyone else who might be interested in a workshop. We're particularly interested in finding out if there are as many people out there as we think there are, who have gotten into digital photography and have no idea how to use that nice DSLR they just bought. So should we run a basic course for these people?

Again, please take a moment to answer a couple of questions for us. Here's the link to the survey:

FACZEN Photo Workshop Survey

Have you ever known me NOT to put a picture up in a blog post? I can't set a precedent here! I've been rather busy the past week or so, what with writing the presentation on HDR which has now been cancelled, and with one of my rites of spring for the past 10 years, which is re-certifying as a motorcycle instructor at Humber College (take the course. You will love it. You may never own a bike or you may catch the fever! Go to the Humber website for more info. And if you sign up, tell them where you heard about it!).

But every month on the NAPP forums, there's a challenge, called the "Photo Rally". Someone -- the winner from the previous month -- chooses 3 categories. You have 72 hours to shoot a picture in all three and submit them. This month's categories were, "Keys", "Patterns in Nature", and "Things that Stick". I won't bother showing you my 'patterns' shot because I hate it, but here's the other two.
 

"Things that Stick". That's Maple Syrup!

 
The forums are another reason to join NAPP. Where else can you get the kind of advice that you can from this great community. You can view the forums here but you can't post anything if you're not a member. Look in the "Digital Photography" forum for the Photo Rally but browse through the other ones!

In anticipation of the upcoming series of HDR posts on the technical blog, you may be interested in reading this commentary.

Playing with Photoshop CS-5

It's like being back at school. JUST like being back at school. Oh, wait — I AM back at school! Well, sort of. I'm staying in Residence at Humber College and I'm in a typical college dorm room.

Here's the thing. I was looking for a way to stay overnight in Toronto when I was teaching the motorcycle course at Humber College (I'm not just another pretty face! I ARE a motorsickle instruktor, even tho I can't spel it). Humber rents out residence rooms like hotel rooms during the summer, except at half the price! I thought I'd give it a shot. Reasonably comfortable, very convenient to where I teach, obviously and I was going to say it brings back a lot of memories except I'd be lying because I went to McGill University and we lived in Montreal so I never actually lived in residence. Over the years I've stayed in res a number of times on training courses and whatever, though. The difference is, I seem to be the only one around — it's pretty quiet. Cheap, though.

There's 24/7 security here, no way to sneak someone in if I were of a mind to. Oh, well. What do you want for $30/night? Anyway I'm here for a couple of days, then except for a couple of breaks, for the next two weeks. I miss having coffee and my own bathroom but...

So some interesting stuff. I loaded Photoshop CS5 onto the desktop computer (still running CS4 on this laptop, I haven't had a chance to install it yet) and as soon as I had it up and running, I loaded an image into it to test it, and played with one of its new features: Context-Aware Cloning and Fill. Since I'm not an RTFM kind of person, ("Read the F(*^'in Manual), I looked up enough to find out how to find it, then gave it a shot. What I did was to make a loose selection of an area, then hit shift-f5 and Enter.

Amazing. How the program knows what you want to remove, I don't know, but it does! Here's my first test — I removed the climbers and the plants growing on the canyon wall in under a minute.

This image was taken at a waterfall just off the Blue Ridge Parkway down in North Carolina. I can't remember the name of the place, except that it was just South of Grandfather Mountain and was just a short hike off the road. Click on the pictures to blow them up to see what I did.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I shot a couple of photos in my light tent, to update some images on my First Aid website. I needed a cover picture for my "Consumer Products" section so I gathered a variety of kits and threw them haphazardly in the light tent, fired up the strobes and banged off a few shots. Sure I did. Try, "I made what I thought was a pleasing arrangement", then I fiddled with the camera and flashes until it worked — it didn't right away, something to do with the setting of the flash function in the camera, but I finally got it.

So the intent was to create a floating product shot and since all the other shots on the site are on a blue mottled background, I thought I'd create one. I close-cut the kits, used the "render clouds" filter, colourized the background, threw in a drop shadow and voila!

OK, now don't ask me what I was trying to do next. I have no idea. I think I had just installed Topaz Adjust 4 or at least linked to it in CS5 and wanted to play with it, or I wanted to do something with the background, I don't remember. What I did was to select the products in the image, then selected inverse (so everything else was selected) but I think I had the product selection copied to the clipboard, and I hit shift-f5 and Enter. Holy Water, Batman! Look what happened! I added a couple of Topaz-layers (making sure it worked in CS5) and here's the result!

I liked this image so much that I used it as the cover shot for my Promotional Items section on the website, just the way it is. You have to admit it's cool. OK, you don't have to admit it, but *I* like it. So there.

A couple of days ago, I was watching the birds at the feeder and was amazed at the variety of species that were visiting. The Robins were fighting with the squirrels (amazing how mean they are when they're probably defending a nest), there were chickadees, American Goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, a couple of downy woodpeckers and a pair of hairy woodpeckers, white-crowned sparrows, a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks, some blue jays and common grackles, among others. OK, I'm not all that knowledgeable, I bought a picture book of bird species and when in doubt, visited www.whatbird.com and posted pictures when I couldn't identify something. I still don't know if it was a Wood Thrush or a Brown Thrasher. The grackles are mean. They infested the area in a swarm (everyone knows that it's a "gaggle" of geese but did you know it's a "murder" of crows? Cool, eh?). So I don't know if it's a swarm of grackles but an "infestation" sounds good. They viciously attacked all the other birds and kept them away from the feeder when they wanted to gorge themselves. Fortunately they were easy to scare off, I just had to open the door and they were gone.

So this is what a grackle looks like, although the head and neck colour is more of an irridescent blue and the body is darker than the picture shows. The white flecks in the image are snowflakes. In May. Go figure. 

 

And this is a female grackle. In the animal kingdom, the males are the vividly coloured, showy ones!

The nuthatches kind of hang upside down to feed. Here's one on the Scotch Pine. OK picture except for the twig across the bird.

CS5-time. Let's try the new context-aware healing tool. I kid you not. This edit took a total of 5 seconds. I'm suitably impressed.

So that's my first exposure to CS5. I wonder what other magic it has to offer?
Cheating.
 
Have you ever had trouble getting access to an event or a scene to get pictures?

When I got that shot of the perp being arrested for the jewellery store robbery, i shot from far away with the 200mm lens, although the police let me nearer than I would have thought. The professional looking equipment helped. I was at the scene of an accident a while later -- I threw on a green reflective vest and the cops assumed I belonged there. In fact they shooed away some other sightseers and let me right into the scene. So the secret is, look like, and act like you belong there! It works.

Last summer I wanted to shoot the kayakers at the Canadian Whitewater championships and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get in, or get close. So I made up a "press" badge. I made a new one this year. Look official?

You can get a bar code off the internet. This one says "photographer". Oh, and when I'm asked who I work for, I say I'm a "Freelancer" but since I've had some pictures published, I add, "the Toronto Star", the "Toronto Sun", "CTV", "Global TV", etc. I'm not lying! They've all bought pictures from me! OK "A picture". LOL

I'd best get to bed. I have to be up at 5:45am to get to a meeting and it's already 2:00. Bye for now!