The typical photography enthusiast will be careful with the gear. Always afraid of some disaster waiting to happen, dropping a lens and the most common Card failure. In my line of photography the gear will take bangs and some liquid every now and then. It is just part of the deal, I try to be careful and not drop the gear however banging the gear into walls, doors, … will just happen some times. The biggest ways to avoid disasters are: be as careful as possible, get a very good insurance and pay it on time. Yes every January it really hurts to pay for the insurance when there was no income, today I have way to much gear to take the risk. So far I have only broken a few filters when the tripod did tip over, 2 lenses where the zoom or AF failed. This are my workhorse Minolta 17-35mm f2.8-4 and the 70-200mmf2.8. For both I found a great used replacement. Now lets get to the real topic of post. Damaged or corrupted memory cards. Check out any YouTube video, blog post or comments and you would think that memory cards fail at least once a day […]
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Another article about my beloved 600mm f4 lens. When I take this lens to any event I could easily spend the whole event talking about this lens. It really creates gear envy with most photographers, non photographers are just impressed by the size which equates to “BIG PROFESSIONAL”. For me it is just one of the many tools. It is not the one I use the most, or the one I like to take with me. There are many drawbacks, it requires a dedicated bag, it is hard to shoot with this and have a 2nd body it always gets in the way. It is really heavy to carry around. But is has an amazing reach. Last night I did shoot a football (or soccer game if you are from the US) I had the Sony A99II with the 70-400 and the A99 with the 600mm. I did shoot 91 keepers with the 600mm and 330 with the 70-400mm. For this reason I did put the A99 behind the 70-400. 600mm is great but almost to big for the game. As soon as players get over the middle line they get too close. When the local team was playing defense […]
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Some times I get into situations where the conditions are challenging at best. Last week I was shooting an event for the Ice Hockey club for a “fun” game. I know the venue pretty well. When I got there I noticed things did not look normal, dialing my in my regular settings : ISO 1600 F2.8 1/1,000 and the viewfinder was pretty much dark. Not good, I did change the speed and at 1/60s things where roughly where I wanted it to be. Not ideal to take action pictures. On the Positive I had the space between the benches which meant no plexiglass between the action and me. I decided to take out my spare speed-light, after getting the OK from the organizer of the game. Flash has it’s own challenges and 1/250s is not ideal for action, time to switch to HSS which means drain on the batteries, thankfully the Godox external pack is great for this kind of abuse. Eventually at the end of the game the recycle time did dramatically increase, I really did push the flash to hits limits. the auto zoom had to work hard with me following the action. The result is rather pleasing […]
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While in Spain I did check out modelmayhem.com to see if I could find a model to collaborate and test some of the techniques I had been learning and practiced only with my dummy in my lab. This can be a hit and miss, so far I have been mostly lucky. Nidia did respond very quickly and had some great ideas about locations where to shoot. The only draw back it is a very touristy area, which means potentially lots of distraction and people. We did agree to meet on a Sunday morning early well before the shops or tours open. We did bet on good light and empty streets. This did mean that I would have to get up super early and drive 2 hours just for the session. Call it crazy or determination. The 5:00 wake up call was a lithe rough. and by 5:30 I was on the road which was mostly empty. I did drive into just as the sun was rising that alone was worth all the hassle. I had booked a parking close to the location and parked the car. The traffic had been so light that I was 45 minutes early. I started […]
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I have not windsurfed in a very long time. Today as I did get back from a Photo-shoot in Barcelona. Saw the wind and really wanted to surf. With no wet suite this was not an option. The alternative was to take a few pictures. I have been surfing here since the early 80’s it does help when you know a thing or two about the sport.The weather was really something for the hardcore fans. I managed to get some very nice pictures. Check out my selection Sony A99ii with the 70-400, Iso 400, f5.6 1/3200s
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I was recently at a game where I had both my 600mm and 70-400mm lens. The 600 mm is definitely a great tool if you want to attract attention and spend more time talking to people. It seems that many people develop an instant bad case of gear envy. So many people seem to dream about a big Glass but is it really better ? Lets get the negatives for the 600mm lens out of the way first. The lens is super heavy, requires it dedicated backpack When you have to clean the front element you realize that the the weight is not the worst thing about this lens There is no easy way to handle this lens and multiple other cameras it will always get in the way The price of these lenses is really really expensive and you will need a special gimbal, monopod, … I may sound over negative but just trying to keep it real. The lens is however really nice because it has that extra reach and allows you to get really tight on the action. My other lens is the 70-400 G lens V1. I have a love hate relationship with this […]
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I have been using the A99II for a few month an totally love it for action, sports and overall it is a great camera. This time I decided to use it with my Minolta 600mm f4 APO high speed lens from 1993. That is a pretty old lens. I attached the A99II and it just worked like with the old A99 not sure the AF is any faster but it supports the new AF points. It is definitely not the fastest and the age is showing but still good enough to shoot some real football (soccer). This was shot this week for the first game of the season. An evening game with not great lights. I had to push the camera between 2000-5000 ISO nost are shot at 4000 to get a reasonable shutter speed even at f4.0. Here some sample pictures not too bad for this old lady. For this lens a monopod is an absolute must have ! I use this gitzo monopod we got it on clearance sale, any cheap one will do just as well if you pick a sturdy one. And you will need a gimbal head and a dedicated bag. This big lens may […]
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At the end of 2010 I did get the Sony A-850 with lenses and the Sony HVL-F58AM as my first serious camera. I admit that I did use the flash not very often and I had absolutely no idea on what I was doing and the results did vary. Late 2011 I head read most of Joe McNally’s Books [amazon_link asins=’B004QQ3MK4|0321700902′ template=’ProductGrid’ store=’claireemotions-21|claireemotions-21′ marketplace=’FR|US’ link_id=’9e4e9faf-e4e0-11e8-acce-0b06c4a988d3′] and also Bryans Petersons Book on flashlight where I finally did understand how that black magic thing of a flash actually works or at least a little. [amazon_link asins=’0817439560,B00HTK667K|B00M0KJE4G’ template=’ProductGrid’ store=’claireemotions-21|claireemotions-21′ marketplace=’US|FR’ link_id=’ec1645d7-e4e0-11e8-a478-31960722d139′] To be honest my flash was not used much until late 2012 when I was hired to take pictures for the local Ice hockey team and their fans. Flash became a weekly requirement. I used the flash on camera but at least with a Flashbender to diffuse the light. I loved the old Sony Flash mount, you could actually carry the camera from the light. That benefit did go away with the Sony A99 and the mmi adapter. I can not even remember how many time the flash did take an unexpected beating but it did survive all these crashed. Eventually after […]
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Lets talks backups a boring subject. In our house we have a rule, there is one kind of conversation we never want to have and it would go like this : “Ehhh sweetheart I lost all the pictures from XXX (insert any important moment)” In 2001 we had a data crash on a raid drive and lost all of our music. It was only many hours to get it back but a clear warning and wake up call. From that date on we decided we wanted to secure our data. We started by : Removing the RAID Having 2 copies on 2 different drives inside the same PC We added a 3rd copy onto another Server As storage grew we upgraded the disks to avoid age related issues We bought a Synology NAS with the 3rd copy We installed Crashplan to backup between the PC, Laptop,Server and NAS and the Cloud Now with 4 copies things where perfect ? Well almost. We started to take more and more pictures and it started eat up space and cost a lot to grow the storage every 6-9 month. Eventually we did remove the local copy on the server. As storage Grew we […]
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