Hi. I know not much is happening around here. Did you check out the techniques already?

I can be one lazy photographer.

But you know what? Some of my favourite shots I took right here, at home. In my apartment. Or I took two steps out onto my balcony and let my camera capture the scene I saw, right there and then. When nature gives you gifts like these amazing dramas in the sky, and litterally drops them in your lap, its just a matter of being mentally prepared to capture them – both with your mind and with your camera. I call it calculated luck – but you may call it lazy photography.

Just another shot from my balcony

This should give me some blog hits

This is not Britney. Its a wax doll on Madam Tussauds in London. Photo: JOEL RYAN/AP.

The Britney Spears Circus is coming to Scandinavia soon, and with it comes a propostorous contract for all photographers to sign before shooting it.

According to this article in danish newspaper Politiken, Britney Spears management demands from all press photographers a signature on a deal that ensures

1) The popstar assumes copyright on the photos, and the right to decide where and when they are published.
2) The photographers may not use the photos after 30 days from the concert. No archive.
3) No photos must be sold on to third party.
4) Pictures that Britney Spears or the event management finds inappropriate can not be published.

The chief of photography on the newspaper Politiken finds it really unreasonable that, while they are not allowed to even archive the photos, Britney can use any of the best shots for ads and merchandise, like t-shirts and coffee mugs…

The answer from pretty much the collective danish and swedish press and news agencies has been that they will not show up to the event unless this contract is scrapped. Nor will they use archive photos to cover the event.

Magic Lantern is an unofficial firmware update to the Canon 5D Mark II that enables a variety of wanted features for videography.

The firmware enables features such as: Manual audio gain (as opposed to the default auto gain), on-screen level audio meters and lower audio noise. On the picture side, you gain zebra stripes (live clipping warning), and crop screen for various motion picture formats.

This sounds promising. More hacks please!

Link

And speaking of the Canon 5D Mark II, canon just announced a firmware update for it, enabling manual video exposure. One of the top customer feedback points. With the new firmware, you’ll be able to select the following in video mode:

Full aperture control
ISO Speed: Auto, 100 – 6400 and H1
Shutter speed from 1/30 to 1/4000

The update will be available here on june 2nd.

Thanks for listening Canon. Now enable a choice between 24 and 30 FPS shooting, and you’ve got a winner.

… Says Stu Maschwitz, visual effect wizard on films such as The Spirit, DV rebel and, as I know him, Photoshop beta tester, following a debate on Rebel Café.

Did you ever wonder what happened to Vincent Laforet’s Canon 5D Mark II? No? Well, here it is being tested again!* In a true DV rebel style subway short (the subway is at the end) made by Stu. This is probably a more realistic and down to earth test of the 5D II’s video capabilities than the far fetching eye candy of Vincent Laforets Reverie, provided you know some stuntmen, and that you ignore the fact that it really is a true master of visual effects actually filming it.

* Actually, its way unlikely to be the same-same camera, but its a loaner from Laforet in any event.

The latest version of Capture One adds support for the following cameras:

And adds improved support for:

Download

My Canon 40D has an impressive 6.5 second frame rate. Fast enough for the occasional animation shoot. About a year ago, I got acquainted with Casios Exilim Pro EX-F1. It can do 60 FPS in full resolution, and up to 1200 FPS in a small format (336 x 96). Today, we use this camera for rocket engine tests.

Even this speed is effectively dwarfed though, by the Steam Camera. Capturing 6 million FPS(!) @ shutter speed of 440 trillionths of a second, and, for now, comprising of only a single ‘pixel’, this detector is potentially useful for analyzing flowing blood samples in the medical field.

A quick quote from the BBC article explains a bit of the underlying science:

It works by using a fast laser pulse dispersed in space and then stretched in time and detected electronically.

So thats clear, then.

Phase One has released version 4.7 of their RAW developer, Capture One.

New features include a brand new file format, the EIP format, which combines lens correction data with the RAW file.
Tiff, JPG images can now be manipulated in the software. And tethered shooting is now included for Canon EOS 5DII and Nikon D3X.

Download

Perhaps you already know what I am talking about. With the plethora of necessary dialogs and sliders in your daily Photoshop work, combined with a busy schedule and 600 photos to postprocess, how do you determine rational choices for each image, without batching everything with the same values?

From more than a decade of Photoshop work, I have noticed that I have settled on a few ‘magic numbers’ that at least eases my perfectionist mind as to what the ‘just right’ figure may be in several of Photoshops dialogs. Rationality is a very small part of these choices, they have more to do with making quick intuitive decisions that I won’t later regret.

The dialogs in question are in particular dialogs such as filters, for instance sharpening and blurring, the Fade dialog (which I use often), Layer Opacity for blending etc. and the magic numbers I always seem to settle on are these:

In percentage dialogs: 33% and 66%, in sliders, values of 90 and 127.

Why? This is magic, and magicians never devulge their secrets. Or, as we learn from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to everything is… 42. No idea in arguing, just try it. The values of 90 and 127 are based on image dimensions (detail frequency) though, and are tailored to images in the ~6-15MP range.

Do you find that you always settle on the same figures in % and value dialogs? You don’t need to rationalize, but it would be very interesting to hear about your choices in a comment on this post. Don’t forget to include the general image size you are working with.