Thumbing through a recent UK photo mag I came across an interesting article about David Loftus, a Brit food photographer who has worked with Jamie Oliver (”The Naked Chef” - UK readers will know!) on his past five books. Unusually, David works only with natural light, his only lighting equipment being a couple of lightstands and a selection of Lastolite reflectors and diffusers. I very much like David’s clean style and use of differential focus (or narrow depth of field, if you prefer) and agree with his contention that much contemporary food photography has tended to be both over lit and over styled, although there does seem to be an overall trend away from this lately. I think, if I was working as a full time pro food photographer that I would maybe take a bit more of a “belt and braces” approach and at least carry some artificial light gear - if only a small shoe flash and softbox or soft umbrella - to cover unforeseen eventualities but perhaps that’s just my natural caution!

The point about over lighting in a lot of commercial work you see these days is still a good one and the temptation to use a few lights to “refine” the image just because you have them can sometimes be irresistible - sort of “over egging the pudding”. In fact, even when I use artificial light (which is, admittedly, most of the time) I usually only use one light + reflectors - see a previous post Hot Shoe Flash + Softbox = Portable Window Lighting - and always try to mimic the effect of natural light. I would say that the cut off point for me is when there has obviously more than one light source but that is a personal style and preference and in no way a general recommendation. However, if you are just learning about lighting there is no doubt that your lighting problems can increase exponentially when you first start to use two or more light sources and it’s equally true to say that you probably won’t go far wrong starting out with just natural light and a few reflectors. It’s difficult for your lighting to look jarringly unnatural if all you’re using is natural light! On the other hand that might be just the effect you want.

So for “beginners”, for want of a better term, I would recommend using either natural light or, at most, a single light source but, as with most things in life, I would hate to restrict myself to just the one approach or style. However, I will definitely be doing more natural light work myself if for no other reason than to see if the sheer variety of available lighting scenarios might in it itself lead to unexpected changes in the style and emphasis of my work. Or, to put it more succinctly, sometimes a change is as good as a rest!

Over the weekend I finally made the decision to upgrade my Nikon D70 to a brand spanking new D200 (see Time For A Camera Upgrade) which should be on its way to me right now. Thanks to those readers who confirmed from personal experience that I was making the right decision - you really helped me make my mind up!

In preparation for the arrival of my new camera the first thing I have to deal with is that my dinky little ML-L3 infra red remote release won’t work with the D200 - it only works with my D70 and, incidentally, the newer D80 model. That’s a shame as I have grown quite attached to the little doo hickey! Now, a wireless remote for the D200 is prohibitively expensive for my needs and the cable remote is around £40. On eBay there are compatible cable remotes available for about £8 delivered. Of course, these remotes are cheap Chinese made knock offs but guess which I’ll be buying. You got it - the cheap Chinese made version! By all accounts it works fine nearly 100% of the time and right now that’s good enough for me.

This won’t be the first time I’ve sprung for the Chinese alternative purely for price reasons. I recently bought a Right Angle Finder for just over £20 and it works just fine. The cheapest equivalent I could have bought here in the UK would have cost me around £75 and as for the Nikon branded equivalent - that’ll be around £150, thank you very much! Another example… I also recently bought a Chinese Giottos tripod (a Gitzo knock off for less than half the price). That, too, is quite well built, works fine and does exactly what I want it to. Is it as well made or robust as the Gitzo? I very much doubt it but then again… it has had some very good reviews in a few well thought of photo mags etc. I don’t, however, use a Giottos head but that is because I’m pretty well satisfied with my hefty and pricey top of the range Manfrotto ball head and if I replaced that it would be with a Kirk or Really Right Stuff head. You have to draw the line somewhere!

The point I’m making here is that much of the Chinese made gear manages to be ultra cheap and quite fit for purpose. Were I still a pro and giving my gear a right old professional hammering or needing to demand and expect 100% reliability I’m sure I would have made different decisions but, as I said, for now… well, good enough is good enough.

Right now, and coupled with the global reach of eBay, the Chinese are making serious inroads in the photo business mostly based on price rather than innovation or excellence of their products. But the Chinese are a very smart and innovative people and my betting is that this may not be the case for that much longer.

Another week has flown by - and at my time of life I wish it hadn’t (flown by that is). Never mind, it just means that it’s that time again… so here’s my selection of the most interesting photo links I’ve found in a week of loitering online.

Portraits of a strange land - “The Tate’s vast new exhibition of photography celebrates the pleasures and peculiarities of being British.” Interesting accompanying article to this new major exhibition. I can personally vouch that there are more than a few pleasures in being British and many, many peculiarities!

Color Photographer Saul Leiter - “Saul Leiter began his adult life studying at the Cleveland Theological College, but eventually moved to New York to work as a painter. There he began taking pictures, working with 35mm colour on the streets of New York in the late 1940s. Leiter’s work was exhibited by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art just a few years later, in 1953.”

Hidden in Plain Sight - “Hidden in Plain Sight is a special exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of around 35 contemporary photographs from the museum collection, and it remains on show until Sept 3, 2007. It’s a show of pictures of unremarkable things which have been photographed by artists so that the work calls “our attention to the poetic richness latent in ordinary things.”"

COLOUR before COLOR - “The show curated by Martin Parr, ‘COLOUR before COLOR’ which opens at Hasted Hunt in New York on June 7, (until July 20, 2007) is already attracting a great deal of attention. Parr has selected work in color from European photographers before color became a part of the American art world in the late 1970s.”

Here Is New York: A Gallery’s Album of 25 Years of City Life - “In the early 1970s, when few art galleries showed photography, the Midtown Y Photography Gallery was a rare pioneer devoted to the medium. An exhibition at the New York Public Library revisits the gallery’s 25-year history and the role it played as photography moved into the art world.”

Distance - “Some people believe that between a work of art and its viewer must be a certain psychic distance, a characteristic attitude, lest the work be misunderstood as a mere imitation of reality.”

How Many Artists use Imagekind, Artist Rising, and Boundless Gallery? - “If you’re an artist that has recently joined BoundlessGallery.com, Imagekind.com or ArtistRising.com, then you should know that you’re in for some competition.” An article that reflects some of my own recent slight misgivings about sites like the above mentioned ones.

That’s your lot for this week! As ever I wish you all an enjoyable weekend.

I’ve finally unpacked my new light tent and shot my first image using it. This shot nicely illustrates how easy it is to get a clean white background with this set up.

Click here to buy this print at ImageKind

For the white background I didn’t have to use any backlighting, just a white card propped up inside the tent behind and quite close to the subject. The ultra soft lighting was provided by my SB800 plus my Chimera softbox angled at 45 degrees and set up just touching the outside of the light tent’s top right corner. This delivers a degree of top and side lighting with some feathering so as to retain some modelling and tonal contrast. The technique is a particularly apt one for photographing both metal and glass with the small amount of light fall off it provides, of which more in a future post. Once again I used my 70-300mm zoom at the long end to flatten the perspective a degree. Because of the limited depth of field I finished the shot off with the addition of a small amount of film grain to the mid and dark tones in Photoshop to give a slight “tooth” or texture to the out of focus areas.

The light tent I eventually settled for was a little larger (approximately a 3ft cube) than I would mostly need and is a little unwieldy but I’ve found it worth putting up with that because it’s so much easier, with the extra space inside, to fix up backgrounds, light and dark reflectors etc. Using a light tent makes all sorts still life shots so much easier that I’m wondering why I’ve shied away from using one in the past. Oh well, we live and learn. All in all a recommended accessory if you do much still life work - especially for glass and metallic surfaces but useful for all sorts of other subjects too!

I think I’ve said before that I’m not really an equipment junkie. In truth I spend relatively little on gear and I’m certainly not a “serial upgrader” and just have to get the newest “latest and greatest”. I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me particularly parsimonious or that awful euphemism “careful” with money - usually code for tight fisted! However, and I think this goes back to my Pro days, any gear I buy has to earn its living. The upshot is that I end up buying far less than I actually could afford to. I suppose that’s a fairly happy state of affairs.

Lately, however, I have thought of upgrading my camera. I currently use an ancient (in DSLR years!) D70 - I know don’t laugh. Up until now said D70 has served me fine - I don’t often so much as take the camera off my tripod let alone leave the house with it, I normally shoot tethered to my Mac and the work I do doesn’t really suit particularly large prints so any handling shortcomings of my D70 compared to newer models don’t really affect me and neither do I need the extra megapixels. But… well, I suppose things can change.

Firstly, my eyes aren’t too great anymore and squinting into my tiny viewfinder and at the small LCD screen is starting to get tiresome. Then, as I like to crop fairly regularly when editing those extra megapixels sure would come in handy. Most of all, though, my wife will be starting a new job in Central London and as I will be meeting her from work fairly regularly I will be spending more days in town and will be foot loose and fancy free in Central London so it would seem churlish not to at least explore the photo opportunities of a city like London - something I haven’t done for years.

So decision time… Looking at the general specs it would have appeared at first sight that a simple upgrade to a D80 might suit but first sight isn’t always best. Looking more closely - the devil is always in the detail - and mostly for subtle ease of handling reasons it has to be a D200. The only thing is I think I will have a screaming fit if Nikon announce a D300 a few days after I’ve after I’ve sprung for a D200! Not because, you understand, a D300 may be a way better camera but simply because from the day of announcement D200 prices will probably plummet. Oh well, such are the chances we take in life.

Wish me luck!

Of all the world’s cuisines by far my favorite is Italian. From that it should be obvious that I would have a particular fondness for the tomato. I love them all - big, beef tomatoes thinly sliced with buffalo mozzarella and a little olive oil and basil, mashed and sieved plum tomatoes in just about any rich Italian sauce or deep red ripe vine tomatoes with a green salad - yes, any and all of them. My mouth is watering as I write!

It’s only natural, therefore, that I should photograph them - an homage to the tomato - and that’s exactly what I’ve done. This is a nice simple image that I hope just simply says “eat me”. Same techniques etc. as my still life of lemons (see Using Long Lenses For Still Life Work). Nothing more to say really.

I feel a series coming on!

Click here to buy this print at ImageKind

I’ve been trying out my new 70-300 f4-5.6 ED Nikkor and here is the first result:

Click here to buy this print at ImageKind

Now, this image is just the sort of shot I bought the lens for. It might seem strange to use a long lens like this for still life but, in fact it works very well. I actually made the image in my kitchen with the lens at its longest setting (450mm equivalent) and I don’t have an enormous kitchen so it was a bit of a squeeze!

The reason I used the lens like this is because I wanted a painterly feel to the image and so used the perspective stacking properties of a long lens to flatten the image, just like a painter would, and mimic the very 2D flat effect of most still life painting. Everything else about this image was as simple as it could be. Lighting was achieved by placing the basket and contents in a niche in my wall unit with soft diffused skylight coming through a largish window to the left of the subject (as the camera faces it) and just grazing the front of the basket.

Even with using no fill the sides of the niche were light enough to fill in the shadows in back of the basket so most of the tonal correction was to darken everything bar the front two lemons. As is my usual method I ball parked the tonal editing in Aperture then into LightZone for fine tuning, further darkening, selectively, the background and, with two small oval selections on the front lemons toning down some rather over sparkly (surprisingly almost specular) highlights.

The next and final step was to add grain in Photoshop. For this I used the Alien Skin Exposure plug in. I know I’ve written recently in quite glowing terms about the Power Retouche Film Grain plug in and would still recommend it highly if that’s all you want it for but after trying the Alien Skin product I’m inclined to go for it instead even though it’s considerably more expensive. The reasons for my choice is that the Exposure plug in has a few more controls available - you can tweak contrast, color, saturation, sharpness or blur (sometimes, if using largish grain a little blur renders the grain effect more realistically) within the plug in as you add grain. That extra control is, I think, worth the extra cost.

Anyway, after adding grain and a small amount of further tweaking you see the final result above. I can assure you it’s actually been more long winded to explain than to do!

One last thing - as usual it’s a little hard to get an idea of the extent of the grain effect in a small “web” image like the one here, to get a better idea go see the image at my ImageKind site.

I’m a bit short of time today so I thought I would present my usual selection of the weeks online photo links a day early.

Private Rooms - Photographer Tina Barney’s anthropology of the privileged. An interesting discussion of the photographer’s “Family Album”. Ms. Barney has a show, China Visit, at Janet Borden from May 10 - June 16 of images from her recent trip to China.

Color Photographer Ernst Haas - “Ernst Haas was born in Austria, and studied to be a doctor. He soon turned to photography however, and his first photographic essay “Homecoming Prisoners of War” earned him the Magnum agency’s first invitation to an outside photographer, and a post on the staff of LIFE magazine.” This article is part of an ongoing series on color photography by Christian Patterson.

Photographer Reflects on Jazz Giants, Storm Losses - “Photographer Herman Leonard, 84, captured jazz giants like Billie Holiday and Miles Davis on film as they worked in smoky, cramped, late-night clubs. But he almost lost his amazing collection to Hurricane Katrina.

As the storm bore down on New Orleans, Leonard rushed most of his negatives to a vault at a museum near his home. However, thousands of his prints were lost to the flood waters.”

Campus Arts: “Bare Witness” to the photography of Gordon Parks - “Gordon Parks is perhaps most-acclaimed for his photography but was a versatile artist, spawning the Blaxploitation genre with his 1971 movie “Shaft,” publishing novels and poetry and composing a ballet about Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Gordon Parks - A few examples of the photographer’s work.

Sheila Metzner - Nice selection of Ms. Metzner’s work using the beautiful Fresson print process.

As ever, I hope you enjoy the selection and do have a safe and happy weekend.

OK, as you might have read in yesterday’s post, after deciding that I wanted a longer zoom lens I purchased a 70-300 f4-5.6 ED Nikkor. Before deciding on the purchase I performed my “due diligence” and checked out some online reviews of the lens along with the other contenders. To nobody’s surprise, I guess, the personal views varied quite a bit but to be honest the process rapidly became rather wearisome. I was interested in personal experiences of handling and overall sharpness, contrast, distortion etc. but, especially on various forums, the comments from people who had never even used some of the lenses in question were, ultimately, of little or no use to my decision making process. A lot of these people had seen published benchmarks or were comparing the lenses to others costing up to 10 times more - it all seemed rather beside the point to me. Here - let me say it up front - for most normal purposes almost any lens you buy these days is probably “good enough”. For a view on this that concurs with mine let me quote again from a post by the well known and respected Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer - I’ve actually quoted this before but it’s worth repeating (full post here):

A lot of people who read this aren’t going to like it, but in many cases, people can’t tell the difference. I wish I had the funding to do a double-blind experimental study along these lines (okay, not really), but I’ve tested the proposition pretty rigorously, and I can tell you that even many photographers can’t reliably distinguish good expensive lenses from good inexpensive lenses just from looking at pictures (although a lot of them think they can). And when it comes down to the general public, fuggedaboutit—people just don’t see.

Enough said.

As a follow up to my recent post on Jay Maisel, A Photographer’s Photographer, I was most gratified to be mentioned by Scott Kelby, in his blog Photoshop Insider. Scott is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Layers magazine (the how-to magazine for everything Adobe&reg and President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). He’s also the author of a string of bestselling books on Photoshop. Here’s what he had to say:

There’s a wonderful article over at “Concerning Photography” on living legend Jay Maisel, and his influence on London-based photographer Ian Talbot, the author of the piece. It’s really a fun read. For past three Photoshop World’s we’ve been fortunate enough to have Jay speak for us, and this year when he did his segment during our after hours “Art of Digital Photography” session, he got a standing ovation from the 1,200 inspired photographers. If you’re going to Photoshop World Vegas, put Jay’s sessions on your “must attend” list.

Apart from the greatly appreciated kind compliment the really interesting part is that, once again, Jay will be speaking at Photoshop World Vegas. I would love to be there but it’s a little too far away from London for me. For those for whom it isn’t (too far away, that is) it should be, as Scott says, on their “must attend” list. I bet it will be a lot of fun, not too mention pricelessly inspirational! I believe the event takes place in Vegas in early September.

One last thought - I bet Jay doesn’t “benchtest” his lenses!

For those who read about my agonising over a new lens purchase in my recent post, Plastic Or Metal?, the hot off the press news is that I finally made a decision! Scouring eBay for likely candidates I came across a mint condition 70-300 f4-5.6 ED Nikkor. The price was right and I had to move quickly so I thought: “What the hell, go for it”. I had decided that though the lens is plastic-bodied that was not a deal breaker (in fact, for rather less money I could have had the “G” version but I draw the line at plastic lens mounts) and said lens should be winging it’s way to me as I write. I shall report on my thoughts on it as soon as I have some (thoughts, that is). I could, of course, have upped the ante a bit and gone for the new VR version but the price would have been getting dangerously close to the 70-200 f2.8 VR - well not that close in reality but close enough to dangerously tempt me, if you know what I mean - and the size, weight and reach of the 70-300 should fit the bill for me, for the time being at least.

I did actually read conflicting reviews of the lens, some mentioning a certain softness at the 300mm end and some distortion but, hey, for the price I’m not going to sweat the details too much. Initially I want the lens for its perspective stacking properties for some images of my wife’s modern art glass collection and with my favored extensive use of narrow depth of field and differential focus should not be unduly affected by any notional slight shortcomings in the lens performance. To tell the truth in all my years of using them (and I’ve used a good few, believe me) I’ve never come across a Nikon lens that’s a true dog.

On the subject of photographing glass, my usual modus operandi has been to build the lighting with softboxes and the judicious use of reflectors and/or black and colored cards. No light tent, in other words. But this has struck me lately as a rather pointless affectation so I’ve finally succumbed and sprung for a mid-sized collapsible “eBay” light tent. I’m a great follower of the wonderful Strobist web site and to stay true to the “Strobist ethos” I guess I should have made myself one but, well, life’s too short and the pre made “spring up” light tents were just too cheap to pass up - and they come with 4 colored backdrops.

My final new purchase comes into the “It’s about time” category - a WhiBal™ White Balance Reference Card. Nothing much to say except it works great, is easy to keep clean and the price is right. I got the mid sized version. I’ve found that even when I intend to manipulate the color in my images it all works better if I work from a notionally correct color balance as a base. I’m very pleased with my purchase and it gets a “highly recommended” rating (as if you care)!

That’s it for now - I’m off to play with my new goodies.