(For full effect, you need to view that shot in full size, though that’s only 19% of the full resolution of the image.)

Obviously, half of a good panorama is finding a really striking point to shoot from. In this case, I decided beforehand that I wanted to get a panorama of Edinburgh from up on Arthur’s Seat. For those not familiar with Edinburgh, there’s a large park with a set of hills (really, almost small mountains, as they have cliffs suitable for climbing) in the city. And Holyrood Park is dominated by Arthur’s Seat, the largest of these hills. The Seat towers over Edinburgh, tall enough to be seen from neighboring towns.

A local photographer actually warned me off this shot beforehand, saying that if you go completely up to the top you can’t get a good panorama and that if you go only partway up you will probably have much of the city blocked by the rest of the Seat. He was completely right, but I decided to try this anyway because I felt there was a good view to be had. I’m glad I did, so my second point in ‘finding your shot’ is that it’s better to try a shot and fail at it, than to go ‘well, no, I won’t bother’ and always regret it. Especially when traveling, when you might not get another shot! Some of my favorite shots of mine — this panorama, the picture of the sunrise through the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi — are pictures I gambled on getting, while traveling.

Once you’ve found the shot you want to take, of course, the next step is taking it. I was a bit of an idiot in this case; I only needed the tripod (Manfrotto CXPRO3), the camera (Canon 5D Mark II), the lens (EF 50mm f/1.4) and the pano setup (ReallyRightStuff panning clamp and nodal slide), but I carried the entire camera bag from Edinburgh Castle down to Holyrood Park, then halfway up Arthur’s Seat. Without water. Do not try this at home. Or while traveling. Or, really, ever. Be smarter than me; at least bring a water bottle!

The panning clamp is important, obviously, since you can keep the camera level but still rotate it. However, it’s not /absolutely/ necessary in all cases (my ball-head also rotates at the base, in a pinch I could have used that). However, the nodal slide is /vital/ to getting a good panorama like this. ReallyRightStuff has an excellent page on why, but the short form is that you will have distortions (and a lot more work to do in editing) if you aren’t pivoting the camera around the focal point of the lens.

Of course, you need to specifically calibrate for a given lens. We’ll be writing a more in-depth tutorial on how we do this, but ReallyRightStuff has an excellent page on the basics, in the meantime. Generally, you want to calibrate for a given lens /before/ you’re out in the field shooting with limited time, if you can. Trying to calibrate the 50mm up on Arthur’s Seat would have been a logistical nightmare; to get far enough away from the camera, I might well have fallen off a cliff trying to do it. Not really ideal. But Terence and I had already calibrated the 50mm for panoramas long ago; I knew precisely where to position the camera on the nodal slide.

So once I was all set up to take the panorama itself, I metered the scene and set my exposure manually. You need the exposure to remain constant across a panorama, or else you will have weird issues when you try to stitch them together. In this case, I chose to take 20 panels. Each panel was 3 exposures; the main manually set exposure, then two others bracketed +/- 1.5EV. Each panel overlapped the neighboring panel by 50%.

For the sake of smooth shots, I set the 5D2 to fire on a 2 second timer, and set the Auto Exposure Bracketing accordingly. Then I merely lined up the shot, hit the shutter and waited two seconds, and the camera fired off three shots without my hand there to introduce any vibrations.

Here is a sample of the first two panels in the panorama. You can see the three exposures at each of the positions, and then the combined HDR version of that panel.

The HDR was done using Photomatix Pro — batch processing keeps me sane! — and a bit of tweaking in Photoshop to add my own tweak or, as Terence calls it, “Secret Sauce” to give that sort of dreamlike quality I wanted in this case. I only stumbled across this particular “secret sauce” in the past few days, and will quite possibly go back and redo some of my other UK HDR shots using this technique. If you like doing HDR, I recommend finding your own specific ‘look’ that you like; in this case, I think I finally found mine.

Once I had 20 TIFF files for the panorama, I started up Photoshop CS4’s “Photomerge” tool and dropped the 20 panels in. Photoshop ground along through a percentage bar for a while, and spit out the final panorama. Then it was just a matter of cleanup and tweaking to ensure the result was satisfactory, a reduction in size to 19% of full (for purposes of posting the panorama), and adding a watermark. And, of course, blogging about this.

I probably could’ve made a better explanation of the process here, but feel free to post questions if you have any, and Terence or I will try to answer. Otherwise, enjoy the photo!

Broken flash tubes are one of the most common ways a flashgun comes to an early demise. Unfortunately, the cost of professional repairs often make repairing a strobe a unfavorable proposition – at $150-200 minimum labor charge, often just for diagnostics alone, repairing a flash would costs about the same as buying a new one.  In this installment of the TwinGeeksPhoto.com blog, I’ll show you how I repaired my 580EXii flash gun so that Rachel can take two eTTL capable flashguns on her trip to the UK.

Before we proceed further, do understand that a standard hot-shoe powered flash gun contains high voltage components.  A 300mA jolt across a human heart is enough to induce fibrillation and cause the heart to stop, and the photo flash capacitor in a flash gun has more than enough juice to do this under the right conditions.  In other words:  THIS CAN KILL YOU. Perform these repairs at your own risk; we are not responsible if you kill yourself.

Years ago, when I was in primary school in Hong Kong, my Dad gave me an Olympus Stylus range finder to learn photography on.  It had an external clip on flash, powered off a single AA cell.  One day, after watching the Batman movie, I decided I wanted to build a bat signal, and a good way to do so would be to use the flash.  I correctly hypothesised  that the two recessed metal contacts on the side of the flash were used to trigger the flash, and also correctly deduced that shorting those two pins would cause the unit to fire.  When I proceeded to short them out, with 2 sewing needles pilfered from my Mom’s sewing kit, the flash fired – and sent me across the room.  I had made a potentially fatal mistake of holding one needle in each hand, and as such the electricity went through my chest.  The resultant chest compression was so severe that it (combined with the impact of hitting a hard wood floor) knocked the breath out of me.  Had that been a Metz potato masher, I might not be around today.

That little story out of the way:  let’s get started.

Parts needed:

Flash head:  The 580EXii’s flash head subassembly is integrated with the zoom motor and the high voltage ignition coils.  This makes repairs more expensive, but on the bright side, there is no high voltage soldering involved. The part # from Canon is CY2-4227,  and at the time of writing, US$63.23 from Canon Parts Service.  You can contact Canon Parts Service directly at: +1.732.521.7230.

Silicone oil:  The 580EXii is weather sealed.  This is accomplished by a special molded O-ring like gasket.  Over time, and after disassembly, this gasket material loses its sealing efficiency.  To get around that, I wet my fingers with medical-grade silicone oil and lightly oil the gasket on reassembly.

Medical grade silicone oil is often sold and marketed as “Water proof sex lubricant“.  And, yes, that’s really what I purchased it for – my bottle is quite a few years old and very much unused…

Tools:

Any well stocked DIY maker type should have the following tools:

*  Jewelers’ screwdriver set.  I highly recommend Wiha tools – they are German made out of Vanadium tool steel.  The set from my college days still works beautifully.  Local in Seattle, Hardwicks & Sons carries them.

* Optional:  A “spudger” – often an engineering plastic pry bar, for prying apart the plastic casing.  I actually don’t own one;  it’s next on my list (I’ve been making do with dental picks…).  You can buy them from iPhone / iPod repair stores, such as www.ifixit.com

Let’s get started:
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM OUR LEGAL DEPARTMENT:  THE PHOTOFLASH CAPACITOR IS CAPABLE OF HOLDING A POTENTIALLY LETHAL CHARGE FOR A LONG TIME.  AS IN, DAYS.  OPENING THE FLASH WILL EXPOSE YOU TO A SHOCK HAZARD.  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.  PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

There.  Now, take the jeweler’s screwdriver, and remove the screws shown.  For the screws hiding under the cosmetic santoprene trim plates, carefully remove the trim by inserting a screwdriver or spludger down along the edge of the trim piece, then gently prying it up.  The die-cut adhesive tape will lift out with the trim piece.

Next, with a flathead screwdriver, gently press down on the plastic spring clip on the swivel button side of the flash gun.  This unclips the two halves of the upper flash head enclosure.

Don't use excessive force!

Observe that there are 4 wire bundles coming into the flash head subassembly.  A larger ribbon cable carries the command signals as well as power to the zooming flash head, while a smaller, but much thicker gauge cable carries the actual lines for firing the flash.  THESE LINES ARE CONNECTED TO HIGH VOLTAGE AND CARE SHOULD BE TAKEN WHILE HANDLING THE UNIT.  At this stage, the voltage is probably ONLY 300V or so; it is enough to give you a very nasty shock.  Off the coils, however, the voltage can be in the kilovolt range, which will paralyse muscles.

HV and control cable bundling disconnected for clarity. Note the flex circuit ribbon entering the flexible printed circuitboard assembly for the flash head subassembly, about 9o'clock position to the copper coil. Do not damage the connector / ribbon cable!

Standard procedure, for anyone who’s ever worked with high voltage, is to discharge though a 1 megaohm resistor.  Most people don’t have a 1 megaohm resistor, so you can *carefully* short the contacts with a screwdriver with an insulating handle.  Sparks could fly when you do this, so be warned.  (In my case, I havn’t had batteries in this flash for over a year, so no fireworks.  Still, I shorted the pins just to be sure.

Molex (tm) connectors for the high voltage cabling assembly. Don't touch the solder ends without discharging the capacitors first ... it hurts.

Next, disconnect the molex connectors.  A spludger works; I used a flat jeweler’s screwdriver to carefully pry them off.

The two other wires that are attaching the flash head are the following:  A small ribbon / flex circuit to the flash head’s flex PCA, and what appears to be a grounding, conductive plastic wire of some sort to the polycarbonate housing.  Remove these.  Remove any excess glue on the black grounding wire.  You will tape this back in place with scotch tape.  Pay attention not to pull too hard on the flex, those suckers are delicate.

Now, remove the 2 black screws holding the white polycarbonate housing.  The fresnel lenses will probably come out too.  Note the orientation and order of the fresnel lenses; the gasketed lens is in front with the ridges facing out.

This frees the flash head subassembly.  Replacement is in reverse order, for the most part.  Don’t touch the flash tube, or the output glass – oil on fingers tend to shorten lifespan of these components.  I found it easiest to tape in the black grounding wire, then the power and signal cable bundles, then install the subassembly into the housing with the two screws.  Finally, carefully hook the hole in the flex circuit connection with the end of a toothpick and slide the connection into the mating connector.

After the connectors are in, reinstall the fresnel lenses.  I use a little bit of waterproof sex lube silicone oil to lubricate the O-Rings, so that they maintain their weather sealing.

Reassemble in reverse order and test.  Voila!

Above is an example piece I did.  Cost of materials is about $55.00, plus the raw material cost of the print.  Print size is 12″ x 18″, printed using Canon dye-based ink on Canon Platinum Pro photo paper (A3+ size).  The framing profiles used  are Nielsen-Bainbridge #11 profiles in German Silver.  All mats are archival, acid-free mats – note that it is a double mat (with secondary border) around the photo.

Cost Analysis and Print Pricing:

One of the traditions that Rachel and I have is that we always try to visit a local farmer’s market every week.  Inevitably, there will be someone out there selling prints and artwork, and being photo geeks, we’d be drawn towards the booth like a furry little footrest going after a doggie biscuit.  And whenever I look another photographer’s work, I look at:

• What they shoot
• How they present their prints
• What they charge

And lately, the prices have been falling.  I’ve seen framed artwork, about 6″ x 6″, go for as little as $40.00.  Another vendor at the Fremont Solstice market was selling 12″ x 36″ panos, framed, for $195.  And let’s face it, with the US entering what most people have termed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, discretionary spending is going to be down – way down.  Pretty objects to hang on walls certainly falls under discretion spending catagory.  Given what commercial frame shops charge – and let’s face it, they are good people trying to make a living in tough economic times too – it’s quite obvious that the only way these artists can be making money at these prices is by doing all the grunt work themselves, and hoping that increased volume will increase revenue.

In this post, we’ll go over the raw materials and cost data.  These prices are current as of Summer of 2009.  It’ll give you an idea of your “Cost of goods sold”.  You can then factor in your labor costs and know where your base-line pricing for your prints are.

Elements of a Framed Artwork

A framed artwork, for the purpose of our discussion, contains:

• The print – what you’re displaying.
• A frame.  Assumed to be a simple aluminum frame.
• “Lites”, or the protective, transparent cover.  Either glass, or acrylic.
• Mats.
• Dressing for the frame – the hanger wires, etc.

The print:

We’ll cover our experiences with printing in separate posts – Rachel uses a Canon Pixma Pro 9000 series printer – which is a very good, desktop sized, A3+ (13″ x 19″) printer that uses a dye based ink.  Terence uses an Epson Stylus Pro 4000 wide-format printer that’s been rescued and lovingly restored.  It is a 17″ wide roll-feed capable machine (paper tray will feed ANSI C paper @ 17″ x 22″) that uses pigment based ink.

The general rule of thumb is that for 4″ x 6″s, Costco, Walmart, etc, all have very competitive pricing – pricing that home users can’t hope to touch.  However, bigger than 8″ x10″s home users will see a benifit.  Then there is also the instant gratification of being able to see a print right away…

The Frame

I chose to go with metal framing for a few reasons – I like the look of a good brushed, anodized piece of aluminum, and I *hate* gluing.  It is also relatively easy to assemble a metal frame – only simple hand tools are needed if you buy pre-cut extrusions.

The Neilsen-Bainbridge company have been in business for quite a while – and they have a line of aluminum framing extrusions.  Most commonly, you’ll find them in pre-cut kits from a well-stocked arts supply store.  I use Daniel Smith for my art supplies – and this is Neilsen-Bainbridge #11 profile, in precut form:

Note that it takes 2 kits to form a complete frame.  The lengths are the X and Y measurements on a frame – so if you need a frame that’s 22″ x 30″, buy the 22″ kit, and buy the 30″ kit.  The extrusions are cut approximately 1/8″ to 3/16″ over norminal, to allow for the thickness of the aluminum profile and tolerance for the mat and glass.  This typically is typically not a concern for most people, unless you’re setting up an assembly line and are trying to calculate packaging and shelving space requirements.

Each of the frame kits also comes with half of a frame hardware kit:

These are the angle brackets for assembling the frame, the spring clips, and the clip for securing the hanging wires.  If you purchased the framing extrusions pre-cut, the ends are already cut with a 45 degree miter and deburred for you:

See how clean the cuts are?  If you’re going the DIY route and cutting the extrusions from stock 10ft lengths, you’ll need a good power miter saw, or a good fine-teeth hacksaw in a guided miter box to achieve this.  Cutting a thin aluminum profile this cleanly is no easy feat.  You’ll need a fine teeth carbide blade optimized for non-ferrous materials – an 80 teeth 10″ blade, with cutting lubricant, would be a good starting point, plus a scarificial fence setup to support the material to prevent tear-through.  Note that a blade like that costs more than my first chopsaw I bought in college.  Below is a shot with the hardware kit installed and the frame fitted together:

A cost table for pre-cut extrusions can be found here.  The astute reader will note that the pricing of the extrusion goes up per linear inch the shorter the extrusions are.  The really obssessive number crunchers will make the assumption that the pricing follows a linear equation of price = 2a*x + y; where a = cost per linear inch, x is the length of each piece in inches and y is the fixed cost element of the pricing – the costs of the mounting hardware, the store’s profits, etc.  Using linear curve fitting, one can arrive at the cost model of 13 cents per inch for the extrusion and about $4.80 for the fixed cost.   The verification of these figures shall be left as an exercise to the reader .

In an ever obsessive quest to “get a better price”, I started calling around to track down the wholesale distributor of these framing extrusions.  I found one place locally that carries it in 10 ft lengths.  Unfortunately they require a UBI number before they will sell you anything.  Price is $1.77 per foot – about 15c per inch, and a hardware kit costs $1.50.  Looking at the costing data above, this is a savings of, on average, of approximately $8.10 per frame, for cutting it yourself, vs buying pre-cut extrusions.  This does not include the wear and tear, and resharpening expense, of a carbide blade, the initial investment of a miter saw, plus the mess and headache of working with a miter saw and the clean-up time afterwards.  This is also assuming that I don’t have to buy and store additional scrap pieces, left over from cutting 10ft sections.  It is therefore my conclusion that unless I am doing a HUGE amount of framing, to standard sizes, it is not worth my time and effort to do the cuts myself.  (If I’m doing 10 – 20 frames at one time, then the analysis results would be different.  There, I can afford to setup a production stop guide, and at 10 frames, a savings of $81.00 might be worth it to lug out the saw, set it up and cut all my extrusions).

What if you don’t see a frame you like in the precut framing kit section?  You can order custom framing extrusions, cut to order, from the following vendors:

Daniel Smith – PictureFrames.com – AmericanFrame

Lites

In frame shop terminology, “Lites”, or glazing, refers to the glass or acrylic covering the artwork.  This serves to provide protection from the prints – in cases such as Ilford Smooth Pearl / Ilford Smooth Gloss paper, this is important for print archival as the porous microceramic coating on the paper is very susceptable to gas-fading.

In this department, the two most common, affordable choices are single strength window glass and acrylic.  Do not be tempted to use more shatter-resistant polycarbonate for framing – it may be more impact resistant, but it scratches a lot easier.

Glass can be purchased, cut to size, from the local Lowes.  Interestingly enough, Home Depot does not sell glass, cut to size, but Lowes does.  You buy from a pre-cut size and you get 2 cuts free.  Someone from the hardware department will operate the glass cutter for you.  Just remember that cut glass is really just broken glass with the break in a straight line – the edges are razor sharp and will draw blood at the slightest provocation.  In fact, most framing injuries occur with the sharp glass edge.  Make sure you wear leather work gloves when cleaning / handling glass.

Acrylic for framing comes in two grades:  plain, and reflection controlled.  Plain acrylic is just that – clear plastic.  Reflection controlled acrylic had been given a slight texture on one side to cut down on the amount of light reflected off the plastic’s surface.  When framed with an artwork close to the acrylic, this matt texture isn’t apparent, from normal viewing angles.  One can see the difference in the test shot below:

The glazing on the left is reflection controlled acrylic, the glazing on the right is plain window glass.  You’re seeing the glare from the overhead florescent lights in my garage in this shot.  Note that the reflection controlled stuff diffuses out the light evenly and improves somewhat the visibility of the text underneath.   Due to how reflection-controlled acrylic works, the print must be framed fairly close to the glazing.  Therefore, it’ll be very difficult to use this material with deep shadow boxes.

Reflection controlled acrylic is $5.45 per square foot from Tap Plastics, a local vendor, cut to size.  I started using glass, but have now switched over to this stuff, as it’s a lot safer to handle.  It comes with protective paper backing, so I don’t have to spend time cleaning it.  The drawback is that in the process of removing the paper backing, a lot of static electricity can be generated and the plastic becomes a dust magnet.  Still, this is nothing that a quick wipe with alcohol and lint-free wipe can’t fix.  As with any framing material, do not use ammonia-bearing cleaners, such as windex, to clean the glass /plastic, as degassing ammonia will greatly decrease the print’s life.  I’ve found that a mild detergent and distilled water / rubbing alcohol works quite well for cleaning.

One step up from reflection controlled acrylic would be anti-reflective glass.  This is glass that received an optical coating, by means of chemical vapor deposition.  Needless to say, this is very expensive, “museum grade” material.  Personally, if I ever need to frame stuff this way, I’ll go to the local frame shop.

In the next article, we’ll talk about the different types of mats, and the tools to work with them.  Stay tuned.

Well, you’re not the only one thinking that. In fact, as the summer months kick off, rental houses enter into their busiest season.

Most rental houses, such as online folks like LensRentals.com, or local resources such as Glazer’s Camera Rentals – take reservations. And, if you you know you are going to be shooting an event, you should call in your rental reservations the moment you know the dates.  You can always cancel them if plans fall through.

In other words, don’t be like my sweetie, who forgot to call in her rental EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS for shooting the Fremont Solstice Parade today. Fortunately, this is a lens that I own, and I did find out after calling all around a 70-200mm f/2.8L (non Image-Stabalized) lens that I can rent. This event being important for her, I’ll be shooting my backup 40D and her backup 40D – and giving her my treasured “magic drain pipe”, my beloved EOS 5D Mk II and my 8Gb UDMA memory card.

As for me? I called in the rental EF400mm f/2.8L IS a year ago when Seafair’s dates were set…

That out of the way, let me show you what *not* to do on framing a piece of artwork:

Don't do this!

The cuts are technically perfect – or pretty damn close.  There is some blade deflection in cutting the double bevel – something I’ll fix the next time by building an extension to the mat cutter.  But in the process of working out the border sizes – I had forgotten that I’m now framing things with a 3″ border instead of a 2″ border.  As such, I cut an almost perfect double-bevel opening 2″ too wide.  And if not for the fact that my cheap test ink-set in my Epson 4000 (the subject of another article) looks like mud – I’d be tempted to just re-crop the image in LightRoom and run a bigger print.  This was about 2, 3 hours of work down the drain.  (It took 2-3 hours because I was documenting as I go for this blog post – and screwed up the first go-around by cutting the bevels backwards.   In theory, I should be able to do this in an hour).

Now, that out of the way, let’s look at the framing tools.

First, the mat cutter.  Progressing up from a simple ruler / linear guide (such as Logan’s Adapt-a-Rule) system are board-mounted mat cutters.  They all feature some sort of adjustable fence system, with a base for the mat to be fed onto.  After playing with an Altos mat cutting system that my Dad owned, and the Logan mat cutters at Daniel Smith, I settled on the Logan Intermediate+ 450 model.

The 450 had a few BIG advantages over Dad’s Altos 4501:

• Cuts on the line.  Logan’s design for all their cut heads (pictured below) is that the cutter head cuts on the edge of the guide.  To use it, you simply line up the cut line under the guide’s edge, hook the cut head onto the rail and go.  A U-shaped feature on the cut heads guide the cutter to prevent it from wandering.  This is a HUGE step up from the Altos design, which requires offsetting the guide from the cutline (much like a Skillsaw).
• The 450+ cuts up to 40″ wide.  40″ is the “magic number” in framing.  Pre-cut metal frame strips comes in sizes up to 40″, and 32″ x 40″ is a standard size for matboards and foam board at any well-stocked crafts store.  It is possible to get matboard and frame extrusions larger than 40″, but I’d expect the cost to go up signifcantly, along with the transportation headache.  Besides, very few people have the wall space to hang a 40″+ piece of work, or files with the resolutions required to generate such pictures in the first place.
• At about $160-170, this is a fairly affordable tool.  The next step up is about $350 and adds a longer squaring arm, which I can build myself.  This is a good price point for the features you get.

The Logan mat cutter comes with two cut heads:  a Model 702 Bevel cutter and a Model 701 straight cutter.  The names are fairly self-explanatory:  the Bevel Cutter cuts a 45 degree bevel for the mat openings, while the Straight Cutter cuts mats to size with a straight 90 degree down blade angle.

One other attractive thing about the Logan system is that their blades are widely available.  Michaels, and chances are most local arts store, will carry their replacement blades.  This is not true with the Altos system.  It pays to change blades often (each blade can only make about 10-20 cuts before losing its optimum sharpness) and so blade availability is a BIG deal.

The 701’s blade is fixed – retracting it requires unscrewing the mount screw and physically moving the blade.  It is however very rigid and will cut 4 ply mat board like butter.  Just be careful setting it down, so you don’t gouge up artwork, or ding the blade’s razor edge.

The 702’s blade pivots down into the matboard.  The silver line scribed onto the edge indicates where to start the cut – simply line it up with your reference mark, press the silver button to pin the cutter to the board, and push the handle down.  It’s pretty straightforward.

Not quite a framing tool, but invaluable nonetheless.  This is a Bessey Vario-Angle  strap clamp - used in carpentry and fine furniture making to hold pieces together while glue dries.  As with any tool, it pays to get a good tool and take care of it.  Retails for about $30.00.  If you’re local in Seattle, you can pick this up at Hardwicks, or Woodcraft.  Just don’t bother with Home Depot.

The purpose of this tool is two folds:  When assembling pre-cut metal frame extrusions, it allows all 4 members of the frame to be held in tension and aligned into correct position before the corner brackets are tightened down.  When building wood frames from molding strips, it applies even pressure on all four corners while the glue dries.

Harbor Freight makes a much cheaper alternative.  I personally have not used it, but I believe it will work.  As the Harbor Freight design uses a ratcheting mechanism instead of a screw and nut mechanism to apply the tension, I expect that there will be less granuality in applying clamping force and pressure.  I would consider the HF alternative if I were building multiple wood frames and need to setup the clamping for hours, but for metal framing work, I am quite happy with this little tool.

Rounding up the tool collection is a screwdriver to work the fastening clamps for the metal extrusions, as well as a marking pencil.  I use 4H pencil lead in a 2mm lead holder – this is the same tool that I started learning drafting with, some 20 years ago.   A 4H pencil lead can be honed razor sharp for really clean marking lines.  This particular lead holder has a sharpener built into the cap, which is good for obssessive-compulsive engineers sharpening their lead.

Now that we covered the tools – stay tuned for the next post as to how to mat and frame *correctly*

Technorati Tags:
framing, printmaking

Once upon a time, when photographers still loaded and unloaded strange little metal cans into their cameras, nobody paid any real attention to changing lenses in the field. After all, you’d get a new sensor with each shot you take. Not true with DSLRs. Even worse, most imaging sensors carries some degree of static charge, making them a dust magnet when the mirror box is exposed during a lens change.

So, how do you check for sensor dust? This is my method:

* Mount a lens that supports a small aperture – say, f/22 or even better, f/32
* Pop the flash.
* Set your camera to Manual, sync speed, f/32 and use the ISO to adjust your exposure.
* Aim camera at white wall, then defocus the lens.
* Shoot a frame so that the exposure is just shy of clipping in the histogram.

Because the lens is defocused, the only thing that will be in focus in the image would be debris sitting on top of your sensor casting shadows onto the shot – the sensor dust that you’ll need to clean.

First of all, until PocketWizard’s ControlTL and RadioPoppers came along, off camera flash for the most part was a 100% manual affair. This may seem intimidating to beginners, but really, with a few simple rules, setting the exposure isn’t that difficult.

Let’s get the technical details out of the way: these shots were taken on a Canon EOS 5D Mk ii, with either the EF24-70mm f/2.8L or the EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS. Lighting was provided by a single, film era Nikon SB-25 ($60.00 used). The flash was gelled CTO and the camera’s white balance set to daylight. Balanced against daylight, the flash’s output takes on an orange tinge – making it appear that the subjects are lit by fire light.

As an engineer, I approach setting the correct exposure as an algebra problem. For any off camera shot there only exists 4 user-controlled variables:

* The output intensity of the flash (as seen by the subject)
* Shutter speed
* Aperture
* ISO

Just like solving an algebra equation, we try to nail down the unknowns. The first one I tackle is the flash’s output. I know that to have any chance of getting good shots, I need to shoot *a lot*, given the unpredictable nature of the dance subjects’ movements. So, having to sit around and wait for the flash to recharge (2-3 seconds) is probably not acceptable. My choices are really M1/4 and M1/8 – quarter and eighth power. I know that I’m going to be trying to drag my shutter speed (more below) out to possibly 1 sec exposure, so M1/4, and being mindful not doing a “spray and pray”, would be my good starting point.

Once I set my flash output, I arrive at preliminary numbers for 2 more variables: ISO and Aperture. By now, the sun had set and the sky’s rapidly darkening, so for a first order approximation I can afford to ignore the ambient light. From experience, I know that the combination of a gell and a diffuser is about 1.5 stops of light being taken out, so I started at f/2.8 and ISO200. the exposure is decent and so I run with it.

Now, my last variable: shutter speed. this really depends on the dancer i’m photographing. I want to capture as much of the fire trails as possible, so i experimented with various speeds, from 1/6 to 1 second.

Occasionally, the amount of fire being spun creates a large enough “light source” that it contributes to the ambient exposure and blurs my final images. when that happens, I up the flash output to 1/2 power or full power, and then stop down my aperture the corresponding 1-2 stops to compensate. this way, the ambient light contributes less to the overall exposure compared to the flash pulse – and thus a sharper, more well defined image.  See here – notice how there’s a lot less ghosting of the face, etc.  The flash’s much stronger pulse is what’s recording the face, but the aperture, stopped down to f/5.6, means that the ambient light sources isn’t recording much onto the sensor for the rest of the exposure.

Sometimes, having the flash misfire isn’t a bad thing.  The flash failed to go off for the following image, but I really liked the results.  It also gives you a good idea of what the ambient only contribution to the image is:

Two shots taken at the Fremont Sunday Market with off-camera flash using the PocketWizard ControlTL system. I’ve been experimenting with off-camera flash more often, lately!

This shot of a shipwreck on the Oregon coast was shot as a single RAW file, then turned into a psuedo-HDR with Photomatix to bring out the details better, then turned into a black-and-white image with Silver Efex Pro.

A lot of work for an effect I probably could’ve gotten by just bringing the film body and shooting Ilford HP5, but… hey, whatever works.

So, a while ago, I won a spot in the Pravda Studios / Seattle Flickrites Gallery show.  Up until that point, I havn’t printed a single picture that I’ve shot – I’ve been content with just displaying my work on an LCD monitor.  Suddenly faced with a photo gallery show, I decided to give myself a crash course on print making and framing of artwork.

It was no doubt an expensive endeavor – I believe that anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well – and even though the rules allow for matted / mounted artwork, I felt that it was important to complete the entire process, both from an academic perspective, and from a presentation point of view.  Afterall, matted prints will get dinged up quickly (have you seen my home office?), and I’d be flushing the printing costs down the drain.

Now, if I had won the lotto, this would have been an easy exercise.  Buy a nice big Epson / Canon ink jet printer, print all my stuff, take to frame shop.  The only problem is that I don’t have the space for a big honkin’ printer, and a frame shop would want about $80-150 per piece framed.  Multiply by the 10 pieces I’m displaying, and I’m looking at blowing a week or more’s worth of take home pay for 10 pieces of artwork that probably won’t sell.   As far as ROI (return on investment goes) that isn’t exactly attractive.

Given the time crunch and budgetary limitations, I chose to go the following route:

• Shop for pre-made frames from IKEA, Ben Franklin, etc – ideally from the discount pile.
• Calculate based on frame size and mat availabilty the size of the prints that I can make to fill the frame.  (See below for calculation notes)
• Ask very nicely at the local frame shop – I used Frame Up Studios in Fremont- great guys – to recut my existing mats, if possible – or cut new mats, if not.
• Borrow time in the engineering lab at work to clean/ reassemble the frames.

Now, with this approach, I actually have a chance of recouping my investment.  It’ll be much more hands-on (although, much more stressful) I’ll definitely learn more.  Below are my results from my little adventure.

Shopping for Frames and Pre-cut Mats

Just like how hot-dog buns comes in packs of 6 and hot dogs in packs of 8 – the size of frames, precut mats, and camera aspect ratios is another prime example of inter-related industries not communicating with each other.  For most DSLR shooters out there, an uncropped image tends to fall into two ratios:  3:2, or 4:3.  The 3:2 aspect ratio stems from the ISO1007 135 film format, where the image size was 36mm x 24mm with a 2mm gap between each image on the negative.  The more common APS-C form factor keeps the same 3:2 aspect ratio also, with a image size of 25.1 x 16.7mm.  Somewhat less common is the 4/3s camera system, which uses a 4:3 aspect ratio to match common non-wide screen computer monitor aspect ratios (VGA @ 640x 480, SVGA @ 800×600, XGA @ 1024 x 768, SXGA @ 1280x 1024, UXGA @ 1600×1200, etc).

However, this doesn’t really help you when you buy pre-cut mats.  After 4″ x 6″ prints, there are no pre-cut mats with an opening that matches the 3:2 ratio.  And if you’re a 4/3rds shooter, the choices are even more bleak.  5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, 16″ x 20″ – these dont’ really help you much.  Sure, you can always crop your shots to match these print sizes, but often that is an artistic compromise at best.  And if you’re somewhat adventurous and crop some of your shots to a 16:9 aspect ratio for display on wide-screen monitors … well, good luck finding a frame to hold that.

My frame selection was dictated by cost – I knew that the worksmanship will be sub-par, they’d scratch and ding easily, but IKEA frames were … adequate.  It was a case where we’d say in Chinese that the flour costs more than the bread – at about $15 a frame, including mat and glass and mounting hardware, I’d be paying more in raw material costs alone if I were to try to DIY.  With the understanding that I’ll be printing my shots on Rachel’s Canon Pixma Pro 9000 (max print size:  13″ x 19″)  and competition rules that states a minimum of 8″ x 10″ for prints, I worked out the math to figure that the most economic way to comply with the rules is to print 2 prints per sheet of photo paper.  Therefore, my maximum short-dimension of the print cannot exceed 9.5″ (19″ / 2).  Giving myself a border to work with around the print, I arrived at a print size of 8″ x 12″ (2:3) for my regular “SOOC” crops.

As luck will have it, the pre-existing mat from the IKEA fram has a slightly smaller opening.  So I was able to have the opening enlarged (@$5.00 / mat) at Frame-Up to get the mat sizes that I need.  Problem solved.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about the decision to step up the game a bit and build my own frames and cut my own mats.  Stay tuned.