Tag: corso

Cycling for photographers: an update

Posted on by Gianluca Bevacqua

Portrait

After my last post someone asked if they need bike-specific shoes.

These are shoes that have a mechanism to lock onto (specific kind of) pedals, so you become one with the bike, better exploiting your power.

Now while they are certainly nice, almost necessary, to cover long distances on road, or to tackle more demanding terrain at a fast pace mountain biking, their sole is stiff as a plank.

It is intentional, because this increases the power transfer from your feet to the pedals; but at the same time this feature makes the shoes exceedingly uncomfortable for walking around, even for short-ish distances.

So no, I would definitely advise you guys to avoid them for “photographic” use, because when you are scouting a place for pictures you will use the bike to go there, but then you will have / want to do a fair amount of walking as well to get the best angle, to explore places too rough to go to with the bike and so on.

How to: cycling for photographers

Posted on by Gianluca Bevacqua

Montague SwissBike X50

When you’re out in the mountains, or touring a city, or anyway going around spotting locations and snapping pictures there is always that much terrain you can cover without sleeping out in the open or in an hotel.

This is really frustrating considering that most good locations, especially in the mountains, are often miles away from places you can reach with your car. And even if you got a nice all-terrain vehicle you have to know the paths pretty well to not get stuck in some rut or in a place in which you cannot turn around.

This means that a sizable portion of your day will be spent first driving then hiking / walking, instead of photographing. Add to this the constraints of finding the right light (i.e. getting at the location you want to photograph at a specific hour), and then the range will be limited even further.

If I don’t find something to photograph along the way, and the path is not too steep, on foot in a day I can usually cover a maximum of 15-20Km / 9-12 miles before having to turn around for the return trip.

This is extremely annoying, and while there is nothing wrong in revisiting the same places over and over (on the contrary, it is extremely useful for artistic purposes) at the same time this can easily lead you to boredom and to putting the camera down for a while.

Fallen bridge on the Cecita brook

There is a simple solution, though. And compared with the prices of the gear we usually lust after it is a pretty cheap one too. Well, everything is cheap compared with some of those prices!

A well made mountain bike (or road / hybrid bike, if you are more of a city guy) will take you anywhere in relative comfort, and will dramatically extend the amount of terrain you can cover in a single day. Dramatically here means that, without steep hills in the way and once you get fit enough, you can cover as much as 160Km / 100 miles IN A SINGLE DAY and usually at least 80-100Km / 50-60 miles. There is also a lot of people out there touring the U.S.A., Europe, Asia, Australia on bikes racking up thousand and thousand of miles for months on end.

Just for reference, going often at a leisurely (read: sloooooow) pace to be able to spot interesting scenes I usually cover around 30Km / 19 miles in a couple hours (on reasonably flat or undulated terrain). When the gradient steepens the game get tough, but it is still doable and, in the worst possible case*, you can always step down the bike and push; after all you’re not competing in the Tour de France!

*Where I live the differences in altitude are often extreme: in just 10-15Km / 6-10 miles a road can get you from 200 to 1400 meters / 650 to 4600 feet or more. This can happen at sea level as well, because here in Calabria the mountains practically dip their toes in the sea along almost the whole coast.

Bonus point 1: especially when I’m out scouting a new location, it may happen that some of the best views are from a stretch of road on which there is absolutely no place to safely stop a car, not even for a few minutes (typically on a bridge or a causeway). This is no problem at all with a bike: just toss it up on the margin of the road, on a piece of grass or over the guardrail and you’re good to go.

Bonus point 2: you can adapt a small tripod head to the handlebars (or buy one pre-made). While not a substitute for a proper tripod, it will make possible going out ultra-light when you are not in the mood for carrying a lot of gear or maybe are just evaluating the potential of a place.

Note: above I said a “well made” bike. This means avoiding like the plague the cheap models sold in malls. These might barely be fine for use on flat tarmac (and even then, the experience will not be so comfortable and the bike will not last all that long), but for paths and cross-country they can be downright dangerous. Imagine what would happen if riding on a rough path out of nowhere one of the bike weldings should snap… Or what *will* happen when you’ll try to brake in wet conditions with your cheap steel wheels (hint: nothing, and you’ll become really intimate with a tree). You get the idea.

Stella under a tree

So, to ride in style and comfort this is what a bike-riding photographer will need:

 

1) A bike (duh!)

A mountain bike (landscape guys), or an hybrid / road one (cityscapers and street shooters). Pretty much anything from 450-500 euro will do. Obviously the more you spend the more you get, as always.

  • If you plan to use it only in cities go for no suspension at all (and you might find something good as low as 350€).
  • If you plan to limit yourself to normal paths peek one with just a (good) front suspension, a.k.a. “hardtail”.
  • If you plan to ride it on rough paths or on no paths at all spend a bit more, and get a full suspended model (front and rear); your butt will thank you, and you will ride safer too. But if you can’t spend more then get the best hardtail you can afford, instead of a cheap-o dual suspension.
  • If you, like me, have a car with a small trunk and worst still live in a building with a tiny elevator consider buying (for a bit more) a good full size folding bike like one of the Montague series. I own a Swissbike X50, but probably the best for price-performance ratio is the Paratrooper. For a small car trunk you can get away without having to spend more on a folding just removing both wheels from the bike (buy one with quick-releases) or using a car rack, but fitting a bike in a small elevator (important if you plan to use it also on your normal schedule) it is quite a bit more tricky.

“Cro-Mo” frames are made of steel, while the “6***” and “7***” are aluminum. Steel ones are usually heavier, but better for long touristic trips (steel is easy to weld in a pinch, aluminum is not). Both kind of frames are fine for every other use, but like I said before avoid at all costs steel wheels: they weight too much, are cheap, and on them the brakes simply don’t have enough friction to be able to stop you.

About brakes: good V-brakes are powerful enough, but if you have the dough spring for disk brakes; they are more powerful and much better in wet weather.

Keep your tires inflated at the correct pressure value to reduce the pedaling effort (it is written on the outside of each tyre). If you use your mountain bike only on tarmac, make yourself a huge favor and change those knobby tires for slick (treadless) ones. And check that the arrows on the side of each tyre match the direction in which the tyre is actually rolling.

Try to peek a bike weighting less than 10-11Kg / 22-24lbs (road) or 13-14Kg / 28-30lbs (if suspended) to actually enjoy the experience, otherwise you’ll think you’re trying to move a rock. Once bought the bike, learn how to correctly set the height of your saddle and stem, and to make basic repairs like mending a tube (Youtube as always is your friend).

 

2) A few safety items for the bike

At the very minimum you will need to carry:

You could certainly carry more, especially on a multi-day trip, but with the stuff above you will be covered for pretty much anything. You can buy the whole kit for much less than 50€.*

*Naturally you will have to bring along a bit of money and the stuff you usually carry hiking as well, like mobile phone, map, knife, etc. if heading for the wilderness

Roots and the Cecita brook

3) A few safety items for you

You will need:

  • Water: in cycling you are the engine, and to keep you cool you will have to be well hydrated
  • Food: energy bar and / or gels are great, light, tasty and can give you just the boost you badly needed
  • Gloves: if you should fall you will avoid scraping the palms of your hands on rocks or tarmac
  • Glasses: sunglasses or clear impact-resistant glasses are great to avoid bugs and pebbles flying straight into your eyes
  • A rain / wind jacket: even when the sun is shining going fast downhill can cool you to the bones!

All of the above you can have it for more or less 10€, with the exception of the rain jacket. The cheap ones do not breath, and you end up steaming inside them like a wonton dumpling.

The good ones are in Gore-Tex™ and, even if they can cost quite a bit, last an eternity if well looked after and let you enjoy your day. For a cheap breathable option look for military Gore-Tex™ jackets; they may be come only in camo and be not quite streamlined for maximum aerodynamic effect, but usually don’t cost a mint (30-50€).

4) An helmet

This is a really important item. But, honestly, I’m lazy and when I’m out spotting pictures I go slow anyway, so I carry one just when I ride for fun (read: fast) or on really rough terrain, otherwise I don’t bother. Not the safest choice, but anyone has to decide for himself where to draw the line between safety and comfort. I tend to run pretty hot, so in my book comfort wins; your mileage may vary, as they say.

This in the mountains; if you ride in a city, with all the cars, just get an helmet and use it. From 10 to hundreds of euro, depending on design and comfort. But keep in mind that as long it is CE approved even the 10€ model should adequately protect your head anyway. Discard it after an impact, and change it every few years regardless.

 

5) A saddle

There is a strong possibility that whatever bike you choose the saddle will not be comfortable enough for you. The right saddle depends from the width of your hip bones, so it is an extremely personal choice. Again, from 10 to hundreds of euro, but probably worth spending between 20 and 40€. Don’t skimp on this, is the difference between enjoying the ride and cursing your bycicle all the way.

Leather saddles (Brooks and the likes) are supposedly the best because they conform to your body shape with usage, but that will happen only after at least 800 Km / 500 miles of riding them.

 

6) A rack (optional)

If your bike came with a rack, or if you buy one, you can then mount the backpack (and the tripod*) on it and avoid having your back sweating like the proverbial pig. There is even a more elegant solution: the so called panniers, bike bags that clip onto the rack sides. Not indispensable, but nice (especially on roads, less so on dirty tracks) because they lower your center of gravity making the bike easier to control.

*Without a rack you can carry the tripod strapped to the top tube.

 

That’s all you need. For the cost of a cheap lens you will be able to shoot thousands of pictures more, get fitter and discover hundreds of new places. I’d call this a really good investment.

 

The Masters speak: 46 quotes about photography

Posted on by Gianluca Bevacqua

Trees in a valley

During the years I stumbled on a few quotes from various (often great) photographers, writers and painters that I thought revealed one or more facets of this beautiful art. I decided to share them with you because they can teach us more than a thousand page manual could what the essence of photography is. Enjoy your reading!

 

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!”
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
Ansel Adams

 

“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”
Robert Adams

 

“What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.”
William Albert Allard

 

“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.”
Diane Arbus

 

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
Cecil Beaton

 

“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.”
Tony Benn

 

“So, what do you photograph?”
I swallow my wine.
“What?”
“You know – city scapes, nature, portraits, candid shots…”
Boobs. I photograph boobs.
“Uhh… people?”
Iris Blaire, Dark Frame

 

“To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.”
Brassaï

 

“Would you hang it on your wall? Then it’s a good photograph.”
Leslie Dean Brown

 

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
Robert Capa

 

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”
Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

“If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time.”
Robert Doisneau

 

“A tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light – light – into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.”
Marisa de los Santos

 

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
Elliott Erwitt

 

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice”
Robert Frank

 

“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”
Nan Goldin

 

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”
Ted Grant

 

“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
Ernst Haas

 

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.”
Matt Hardy

 

“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”
David Alan Harvey

 

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”
Yousuf Karsh

 

“It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.”
James Lalropui Keivom

 

“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.”
Robert Mapplethorpe

 

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”
Don McCullin

 

“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.”
Joe McNally

 

“Actually, it’s nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I’m only choosing the perspective.”
Katja Michael

 

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
Joan Miro

 

“With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality.”
Martin Parr

 

“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
Man Ray

 

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
George Bernard Shaw

 

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”
Aaron Siskind

 

“All photographs are memento mori.”
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
“When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”
Susan Sontag

 

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau

 

“You cannot depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus”
Mark Twain

 

“The camera basically is a license to explore.”
Jerry Uelsmann

 

“Only photograph what you love.”
Tim Walker

 

“When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don’t leave until you have captured its essence.”
Minor White
  

The 10 commandments for choosing a digital camera

Posted on by Gianluca Bevacqua

10 rules to buy a digital camera

1) All things equal, newer is always better

The technology doesn’t walk, it runs! Think: faster processors, more megapixels, better control software, and all of this at a cheaper price too.

 

2) Size – often – matters

A larger sensor will be always better than a smaller one OF THE SAME GENERATION, even if they both have the same amount of pixels. Larger photosites (this number is often referred as “pixel pitch”) will give you cleaner images compared to smaller ones. It’s like trying to collect rain: obviously you will get more water the bigger the buckets you use are; the same goes with light and photons. And the difference will not be noticeable only at high Iso, even if the higher you crank the sensibility the more dramatic it will shows.

 

3) Three is the magic number

I stressed in the point before “of the same generation”. Every 3 years or so the improvements in technology let you obtain the same quality you used to get with a large sensor of the previous generation with a smaller, “younger” one. Obviously the big sensors of the same generation will be still better than the small one – see previous rule – but at some point the quality you are getting is high enough that image quality alone stops to be a worry, and other things like portability or weight comes into the equation.

 

4) No, wait: two is the magic number!

A 2-time increase in megapixels let you notice with ease the differences even in prints of the same size – and not only pixel-peeping. With this I mean that it will spot the difference not only the trained eye of a professional, but the layperson’s too.

 

5) Decide how big do you want to print

Given the amount of megapixels that are packed into the latest cameras it starts make sense to reverse the question. Not: how many pixels has the camera? But: how many megapixels do I need? This basically depends on how big you wanna print: so decide this first, and keep in mind that for the odd large print, at least with subjects like landscapes and architecture, you can alway combine various shots to increase the resolution your camera is capable of.

See my previous post: How many megapixels do you need

6) The chip matters

The images just captured go from the sensor to a pre-processing chip (for example the Canon Digic or the Sony Bionz); this before being saved as raw files. How this chip handles them makes a lot of difference, even if you compare two cameras with the same sensor but different chips.

 

7) Firmware matters

In a rapid market like the photographic one products get often released when there are still a few, yet undiscovered, faults. So before making a definitive judgment on a camera be sure that the firmware – the little control software that makes the camera work – is not at its first iteration. Think, for example, what happened with the Fuji X100: almost awful when it hit the shelves with its first firmware, it got better and better with each update and now it is a terrific camera.

 

8) Raw software matters

Raw files are a bit like a musical score; the song – the image – is in there, but the interpretations can vary a great deal. Choice wisely, and test the files from a new camera with various raw converters before judging its quality.

You can see how much this matters here: The importance of choosing the right raw converter

 

9) AA and IR filters can rob sharpness

AA filters are expressly designed to rob sharpness, so not a big surprise. But also the infrared reduction layer put on top of the sensor can wreak havoc with your lenses, especially if they are wide-angles. This, supposedly, because of the thickness and the refractive qualities of this additional layer of glass. There is some evidence, for example, that once you remove the IR glass from a problematic – with wide angles – camera like the Sony A7r the corner smearing goes away. And this is probably why a prehistoric – in “computer-years” – camera like the Leica M8 can still deliver pretty great results, thanks to its ultra-thin IR filter.

 

10) Last year is good enough

Cameras are now basically computers with lenses, and unless you got paid handsomely for your work is better to trait them just like ones. That means don’t go after the last novelty; buy instead a camera presented in the past year. It will not be cutting edge, but it will still be exceptionally fast and good. As an added bonus, it will be way more probable that the manufacturer will have released, in the meantime, a few firmware fixes to iron out all the problems found by the early adopters – see point 7.

 

How to get the right colors from negative films

Posted on by Gianluca Bevacqua

Kodak Ektar 100 colors, Hasselblad 500c/m and Distagon 50mm f/4

Scanning color negatives is the Holy Grail of the film lover.

The scanning part, per se, is no different that the one you have to carry with any other film, color or black and white. The tricky part comes when you try to obtain natural, or at the very least, pleasant colors from that piece of films covered in a bright orange mask.

A bit of help may come from some new kind of negative film, like the Rollei Digibase, that does not make use of such orange mask; but you will still have an hard time sorting out how to get an usable picture if you don’t know a few tricks.

I will assume here that you have had your negatives processed by a lab, or that you followed my previous posts on how to develop & scan them at home – that you can find here:

 

Best film scanner: Canon 5D Mark II vs Drum scanner vs Epson v700

How to scan films using a digital camera

How to develop color negatives in C-41, the easy way

 

Now you have your film neatly cut in strips and scanned. It’s time for a trip into Photoshop!

Open your freshly scanned image and invert it: CTRL + I on Windows, CMD + I on Mac. It will look something like this:

before image

Don’t panic. Now it is time to use one of the most powerful tools of Photoshop: the curves. They look scary, but are not that difficult to understand, really. Basically at the bottom you have a couple of arrows: these set black and white point. And then you can manipulate the curve, pulling and dragging around, to your heart’s content until the image looks good.

Here is like I do it: first choose one of the colors from the drop down menu on the top part of the curve panel. We well start with red. Drag the left bottom arrow keeping pressed the ALT (Windows) / OPT (Mac) button. You will notice that the image goes away, replaced by a monochromatic version, but that at some point details starts to appear. Those details are actually areas of blocked out shadows or burnt highlights, so we will stop just a fraction before something starts to show up.

Repeat the process, always keeping ALT / OPT pressed, for the right arrow and then for the green and the blue colors.

At this point the image starts to look pretty good, but a fair bet is that the colors are still quite a bit off, with some heavy color cast.

Photoshop CS6 curves

To remove it just switch to the opposite color in the drop down menu (if the color cast is red go for blue and vice-versa) and manipulate the actual curve keeping an eye on the image. Try to not overcomplicate things. Often one control point, like you can see in the blue curve, is enough.

I find that rarely, if ever, I have to recur to more than two points. The second one is mostly just for the sake of cleaning a bit the shadows, that often tend to have some kind of blue cast for “environmental reasons”, because of the light that bathed the scene, or a green cast when you shoot under a tree in spring or summer.

Something like the image at the beginning of this post is what you will get. Quite a difference from the blue mess we started with!

P.s.: you will notice that the leaves in this image tends to go from green-ish to yellow-ish tonalities more or less from the bottom to the top part. This has nothing to do with processing: it matches the scene, or in other words it is exactly like this particular tree was.