Category Archives: Photography

Photography discussions

2010 Pummelvision

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Had to wait at least a week to make another one because I can’t justify Vimeo Plus, this one with only photos in 2010. Stuff happened last year: sold my house in Austin (thus a few Craigslist forsale/free ad pics), half dome hike, more snowboarding in Tahoe and CO, queued up for 5 hours for iPhone 4 in Austin, Banksy visited Sf, Giants won the world series, Hipstamatic and Instagram.

2010 in Pummelvision from Andrew Ng on Vimeo.

Made with Pummelvision: http://pummelvision.com/

Music by Friendly Ghost: http://friendlyghostmusic.com/

Switch your Flickr login from Yahoo! ID to Google or Facebook

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Flickr/Yahoo just added Facebook Connect and Google OAuth support to their sign-in, this is great, coz now I no longer needs a Yahoo! account to use Flickr. (I assume you all loathe Yahoo! as much as I do right?)

Here’s how to change your Flickr account from your Yahoo! ID to your Google or Facebook account:

  • sign into Flickr with your Yahoo! account if you’re not already logged in

  • go to http://www.flickr.com/account/transfer/

  • hit “use existing Yahoo! ID”:

    • Flickr: Transfer your account

  • Hit “sign in as a different user”:

    • Dock-26

  • Choose Google, or Facebook (if you must):

    • Sign in to Yahoo!

  • signin and authorize your Google or Google Apps email and password, or if you chose Facebook, you probably will see a familiar oauth authorization window requesting some permissions

  • Click the “Okay, do it” button:

    Flickr: Transfer your account

Lightroom 3 rocks!

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I tried every single version of Lightroom and Aperture, never liked the way they handled my photos. I always manually organize into a folder hierarchy loosely based on year and then month or event, looked at them in Bridge, and did most adjustments in ACR, and popped into PS for more adjustments or retouching.

A couple of my friends really like Lightroom so last weekend I decided to give Lightroom 3 a try, I had the beta a while ago and didn’t like it. After using it for a couple of days, all I can say is WOW, really awesome software for organizing and editing your photos. If you shoot a lot, and have photos stored across different hard drive volumes, you should use Lightroom 3. Here are a couple of things it really does right:

  • It imports photos into directory structure of your choosing, by default it creates top-level folders by year, and sub-folders of dates, which is pretty much how I did it manually before
  • It is fast! Lightroom 3 and CS5 are finally all Mac native and 64-bit, everything is very very fast
  • After importing about 35k photos across 3 different locations, I can easily find photos based on Metadata. For example, it’s easy to create a smart folder with all photos shot with a particular camera (by model or even serial number), I also have folders of shots with particular lens
  • There is an awesome plugin to run through a selection of photos (or all photos, if you want) and shows you a plot of the focal lengths you use. This is great when I was deciding between which lens to acquire. Here’s how my bar chart looks like, and this was run on all photos (well almost all, I deleted a lot of paid shoots coz I don’t need to keep them) shot with my copy of 5D Mark II:
    • Jeffrey's Focal-Length Plot
    Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
  • For most things you can do in ACR, you can do in Lightroom, unless you’re retouching, there is almost no reason to open images in Photoshop. But when you do, Lightroom has tight integration with Photoshop and it works great
  • It supports dual-screen mode, this is really awesome if you have dual display! I can have a grid on 1 display with the Loupe view on another, this is much faster than zooming in and out in a single display
  • It publishes directly to Flickr, it syncs comments, views, title, caption, and tags. If you edit photos that have already been published to Flickr, you can simple re-publish and it will figure out how to replace the photos on Flickr instead of uploading new ones. When you use a publish service, it automatically converts to the desired format for upload and then delete them, which is really nice. Before I manually did that in Photoshop and was a pain to convert a lot of them (even converting in batches in Bridge was annoying)
  • It’s really easy and fast to sort through your entire photo library by metadata, ratings, tags, etc

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM

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I’ve had the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM for years, it is one of the sharpest lenses out there, and it shoots 1:1 macro. I shoot commercial product photography professionally, so the 100/2.8 macro was the lens with which I made probably more than 80% of my income from photography. I however only used that lens for work, but almost never for personal work. I shot a couple of macro shots to test out the lens when I first got it, it was a fine lens but the aperture was not round enough, so the out of focus area was too harsh for my liking. It worked fine for product closeups, but for anything else the harsh bokeh really bothered me, so the lens never left my studio since I got it.

Canon introduced an L version of this lens, it does 1:1 macro, but has the new IS system that provides up to 5 stops of stabilization, the aperture is also near-round, so it yeilds similar soft and dreamy bokeh like my other lenses. I looked on eBay and was surprised to find out that I could easily sell my 100/2.8 with the hood for around $500, so that means it will only costs about $500 to upgrade, which I think is well worth it. The improvements will make me want to take the lens out of the studio and have fun with it. Amazon has this lens for about $1k, which is an amazing deal IMO. I brought it to the SF botanical garden for a test drive, it performed as expected: much smoother transition between in and out of focus areas, way smoother bokeh, the MTF graphs comparison shows that it is even sharper, but pretty much the whole graph is under the Nyquist frequency of the 5D Mark II so I don’t think anyone can really tell the difference. It is tack sharp for sure though. I accidentally shut off the IS so I didn’t get to test it much, I was able to take test portraits without camera shake at around 1/15 the night before, at 1:1 it will have to give a few more stops to be safe.

Some shots from the botanical garden:

sf botanical garden
f/4, 1/1000s

sf botanical garden
f/3.5, 1/1250s

sf botanical garden
f/3.2, 1/640s

This lens is pretty inexpensive for what it offers, other than the crazy MPE, which is very specialized and it’s pretty much a microscope, the 100L is the best macro lens for Canon right now. The AF is very fast, f/2.8 at 100mm is pretty bright, and it is tack sharp at wide open. The lens also makes a really good portrait lens, not quite as insane as the 85L, but it is half the price and it does 1:1 macro. I would definitely recommend getting this over the non-L version of the 100/2.8 macro. The non-L version is $599 and the hood is about $40, so the 100L is only about $360 more, but you get round-aperture, amazing IS, weather seal, an amazing lens hood (best Canon lens hood I’ve seen), as well as a lens bag! Definitely worth the extra $360 IMO. If you have a full frame body and are ready to buy your first L lens, I’d say forget the 24-70L, get the 100L, it is a much cooler lens to have.

You can pick one up at Amazon, btw, the price on Amazon has been fluctuating between $1060 to $1005, if the current price is too high, you should be able to wait a couple of days for it to drop back down to about $1005: