Canon Speedlite 580EX II

I’m finally getting what I was wishing for in the past few months. Okay, okay, one of the many wishes hahahah. It’s a Canon Speedlite 580EX II. And since I’m cheapskate, I just got YL Camera to bring a used one in. Me knowing them well and being their regular, they bring these requests in within a week. Smae thing happened for the 70-200mm and 10-22mm.

I’ve always wanted to be a strobist, exploring portraiture in depth. Of course, I won’te rely too much on the flashgun. That would be overkill. Available light photography is a separate challenge to explore. I want the flash more than another lens because it’ll definitely expand my creativity. I’ll have to learn how to read the light, including from the flashgun itself, like how to bounce it and all. Bouncing it would be awesome.

Flashes, to most people are very simple to use, especially in point and shoots, because it’s all automated. You just point and shoot, like the name says. But it gives very harsh direct light and bad shadows, which is not nice. With professional-standard flashes like this Canon and Metz guns, those can be avoided and instead turn photos into flattering softly-lit ones. It works simple but effective. Bounce the light from the flash onto a ceiling or wall in such a manner that your subject will get the inderect flash from the ceiling, which has just reflected the light. You’ll get nice evenly lit photos.

Photo from Wikipedia

All this doesn’t come in cheap. When I first told dad about it, he was like “Wth why so expensive. Just a bulb what.” This thing is technologically advanced. It communicates with your camera. Auto and manual exposure is available. There’s no aperture or shutter priority. This one also has a secret behind how it exposes for zoom lenses. The flash head has an element for zooming to match the lens as well. Amazing, eh? The zooming is done automatically, so you can take photos and not fiddle with it. It’s also smart, because it detects your camera model and factors in the crop factor of your sensor into the focal length.

My pop-up internal flash on the 400D is quite powerful but it hasn’t been released and used for ages now. Because I hate direct flash. And that it creates a little lightning when assisting the lens to focus. The 580EX II doesn’t. See that red transparent part on its body? That sends out infrared light to focus so the main flash will not irritate by doing so.

It’s got so many features you can go wireless. Which is the reason why I want this and not the 430EX II. It can be a commander. The 430 can only be a slave. Which means you can use the 580EX II to command other flashes, like the 430EX II or other 580EX IIs which are wirelessly set-up. A 430 can only listen to a 580EX II to trigger itself wirelessly while the 580EX II can do both. So, why not Metz or other high-end 3rd party flashes? The only other choice I had was the Metz Mecablitz AF 58-1 flash which is actually very good but if I’m going to use the 10-22mm for flash shots, the Metz doesn’t get wide enough, to 16mm (after crop factor) as it only goes down to 18mm. The Canon goes to 14mm. Metz will cast a shadow at 10mm on the 10-22mm in other words.

There are so many things it can do. Which I’m very sure will improve my photos. But there are also a lot of other things I will need for strobing. A Gary Fong Whale Tail Reporter/Studio diffuser, mini softbox which can be carried around and reflectors. Probably one or two cheaper or 3rd party flashes for wireless usage. Of course, Sanyo Eneloop AA batteries for it along with a charger are already included in my list. Oh, and the Canon OC-E3 cable for off-shoe usage. That OC-E3 and that Whale Tail Reporter will be awesome for wedding shots. I don’t mind shooting my relatives’ ones for experience. HAHAHAH. I can process and burn them into discs, but not print softcopies because I don’t have a photo printer worthy of such work, one like the Canon Pixma Pro 9500 produces great prints.

Till then. Still have to blog about the Nuang hillwalk. The ShutterAsia gang have yet to post up their images on the forum. I’ve alread processed mine, so I’ll just have to resize and add watermarks to post them here

Nuang Hillwalk Hike tomorrow

The Nuang Hillwalk Hike (refer to previous post) is tomorrow. For that, dad suggested I get a backpack. I didn’t really want another bag, because I got the Lowepro Stealth Reporter D200 AW just 3 months ago. On Thursday, I followed him to work in KL and to get a backpack right after school.

Headed for YL Camera, the regular stop. I didn’t want those half camera bag-half daypack backpacks. I wanted a full camera bag so the Fastpack, Tamrac Adventure 7 and Primus AW, although perfect for hiking, was ommited. It was either the very solidly built Lowepro Vertex 100AW or the Kata GDC R-101 KTC backpack, which looks like it’ll withstand a bomb at it’s front insulator part. The Kata doesn’t carry as much as the Lowepro but it’s more comfortable, lighter and smaller so I chose it. Also got a Kata Reflex E camera strap which is attachable to the backpack to take the load off your neck. Recommendations from Yamiya e-Store’s owner, who was there at that time and Digital Camera magazine’s review also made me get the R-101.

I also got a Manfrotto 682B self-standing monopod for slow shutter exposures, general stability and as a hiking pole. It’s a really strange monopod because it has 3 extra stowable legs so it can stand by itself. So is it technically a tripod or monopod? Hahahah. Those 3 extra legs will definitely come in good use for the waterfall and future HDR shots. It’s sturdiness and build quality really judges its price IMO. It’s considerably light being made of aluminium. Of course, not as light as those hollow-legged monopods and tripods. Because I sometimes don’t trust their quality, I didn’t get Benro. Manfrottosare much sturdier.

For those curious of what i’m carrying for the Hillwalk, here’s a simple list.

In Kata R-101 KTC, Canon EOS 400D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM, CompactFlash cards, Sony DCR-DVD608 Handycam and 3 mini-DVDs for 30 minutes of video each

In Stealth Reporter D200 AW, Canon EOS 5D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L IS USM, Canon EOS Elan 7E, 2 rolls of Kodak ISO 100 35mm film of 36 exposures and Cokin P series filter system

And of course some basic needs for hiking. Extra clothes, shoes, water, caps. I don’t need my iPod, because most of the time we’ll be chatting. I’ll be carrying the Kata and dad will be carrying the Stealth Reporter. We’ll have 7GB of memory space to shoot so there should be some HDRs and RAWs.

Well, I haven’t take photos of the new stuff, so maybe they’ll be posted up in the next update once I take some along with photos from the hike. Till then. Byebye.

ShutterAsia Gunung Nuang Photo Hillwalk

An event organised by Kenneth, under ShutterAsia. Just to let you know, dad and I will be going. The main objective is just for casual shooting and some exercise. We’ll be shooting nature (obviously) in which I might get a good shot for that BASF Petronas Chemicals Conscience Camera Award Competition which I’m still debating with myself if I should join. I’m not really after the prize, really. More like to gain experience. After all, I’m just a kid. It’ll be next Sunday, 27/07/2008, exactly 7 days from now.

Oh, for those who don’t know, Gunung Nuang or Mount Nuang is in Hulu Langat, Selangor with a summit of 1492m but we’ll only be going up to this place called the Lolo Dam at 570m, rest for 15 minutes and make a u-turn back down. Wth I sound like some brochure. Entrance fee is RM1 per person

According to the organiser, the condition of the area is safe and easy, damp jungle, worst mobile coverage. No SMS-ing! HAHAHAH. I’ll need to bring along:

- 1 to 3ltrs of drinking water
- Shoes or sandals (hiking shoes preferred)
- Extra clean shoes and clothes (to change after the Hillwalk™ sweat and mud)
- Trekking Pole or walking stick
- Salt (leech removal)

Optional:

- Cigaratte ash (to clot the blood of a leech suck)
- Wound Plaster
- Disposable raincoat or umbrella

And of course the cameras, 5D and 400D.

From the photos, Gunung Nuang looks breathtaking. A few photos can be viewed here, at the discussion topic packed with details. The bad news is, if you want to join us, if you can, you can’t really. It’s full with a group of 20 people. However, knowing these busy KL and PJ people, they might cancel so keep and eye out! If any of them can’t make it, you can take their spot. Anyone wanna join?

Oh and I gotta meet Freaky there and pass him the money for full memebership. Hmm.. busy Sunday ahead!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.4 Review

Being someone into digital photography, like everyone else, I don’t just have a camera. I have 2 main softwares to edit and manage my images (besides Windows Explorer of course). One of them is what I’m talking about, Lightroom. The other, is Photoshop CS3. Lightroom manages images and tells you everything you want to know about them, exports them into Photoshop for further editing and itself also edits photos. The RAW editor for Lightroom is especially excellent and maybe even superior to Adobe Camera RAW I have available in Photoshop CS3. But I still use Photoshop to edit most of my images. Why? Because Lightroom is more like a file manager and with my 4000+ images and counting from both the EOS Digitals alone, it lags like mad sometimes.

Lightroom can be especially useful if you like to look for your images through descriptions of them. You can tag your images, you can rate them up to 5 stars as well as flag them as rejected or picked. It’s like a studio photographer’s dream. Although Lightroom’s image processing engine is more refined than Photoshop CS3’s, it still lacks features compared to the alleged king of image editing, Photoshop CS3. I shall refer to Photoshop CS3 as PS and Lightroom as LR for the rest of this post, following Adobe’s codes for the softwares. This review only covers some of LR’s editing features, not the managing ones. Well, here goes my insight of LR, to you.

It’s really easy to add a certain kick to an image. Open > Develop > Brightness > Curves > Exposure > Blacks > Fill Light > Recovery > Clarity > (a little bit of) Sharpness and you’ll get a total change. Still, for recovering detail in shadows and highlights, I personally prefer PS’ Shadows and Highlights tool. Much easier to use. However, Lightroom is more lossless.

Think you’ve lost some detail in a certain image? LR has a useful and non-destructive clarity and sharpness (but not too much of it) tool which will really give you razor-sharp details. Contrast was boosted in this image.

If you use a full-frame camera, which really pushes lenses to its limits and set the aperture wide open, you will get vignetting. Just remove it with the vignetting adding/removing slider.

LR also boosts vibrance very effectively, as shown in this screenshot. Just f.y.i., when mum shops, dad and I will go around testing the sharpness of our cameras Screenshot below will again show how good LR is at sharpening.

Lock (what?!) on some kind of handbag the size of my camera bag (wth?). LR really sharpens things up.

I seriously hate chromatic abberation. CA appars on photographs in edges, along transitions of harsh contrast and normally on super wide lenses. Not to worry, just blardy remove them. lol

Probably the worst scenario for some: a wrongly metered image resulting in underexposure. Not for LR users though. Just do Exposure > Brightness > Recovery > Blacks > Curves and it’ll turn out nicely

And not forgetting one of LR’s neatest feature – the EXIF viewer.

Okay, the precision of the time and everything depends on your camera actually. And I know this EXIF viewer isn’t as detailed as Windows’ own one but see that lens section? How cool is that? You can see what lens you used for that image, if for any reason you’ve forgotten. Whenever I forget that, I’d just guess from the focal length data. Oh btw, from my experience, images taken by Nikons don’t have the lens data. (camera) Owner/Creator’s name is also there, but it’s cropped off here.

My conclusion would go simple. Lightroom is a great, powerful tool for hobbyist and professional photographers alike. It’s great for recovering from unsharp/underexposed images and increasing vibrance and detail. Photoshop would be more useful for architectural photographers as it has a perspective control feature. Also, it has a very useful automated HDR function. It’s also better for web usage because with it, you can insert watermarks and all that wordings into the image. However, I don’t advise overkill on these programs. I strictly don’t employ that “Oh, it’ll be fixed in Photoshop/other editing programs” attitude. Shoot a good image and improve it in Photoshop/Lightroom/others (: If this review is liked, leave a comment. I might do a Photoshop CS3 one

Well, till the next update (: Thanks for reading!

What I do when

my parents are out till after dinner. It’s a Sunday. It’s boring. Hahahah

Just grab that 70-200mm L and 400D and go for a little walk within the house. Unless you just wanna get robbed, stay within it.

Shot in RAW image format, not JPEG. RAW is good if you have Photoshop. Don’t ever use Canon’s default software. It just lacks features to process the image. One of my first RAW series. I’m not someone to process huge amounts of RAW files unless they’re really gorgeous shots. It’ll kill you. It’s just like processing a negative, digitally.

You have so many options with RAW. You can even make the image like, 2 times your camera’s resolution without losing much detail. A lot like film. Be warned, RAW files are huge. Something like 10MB a file. And I’m running out of hard disk space. My computer’s not balanced. I’ve got a huge RAM and processor and all that stuff that i under-utilize but I have a tiny hard drive. While my brother has a crazy 500GB one in his notebook but we have same performance specifications. I want that Western Digital 1TB USB 2.0 drive! Heh. AND an Apple MacBook Pro which dad said he’ll get for me when I’m in Form 6. Hahah

The under-utilised TV antenna pole of one of my neighbours. Who uses these things now? Not me.

The PVC pipe which was on my roof since a few years ago. Thanks to a construction worker.

Electrical pole. I don’t think I corrected the perspective in Photoshop. Accidentally tilted.

Urban decay.

Wiring. Rain. Water droplets. Thank the rubber.

Hmm… That’s all. It’s really boring here. Maybe I ought to go study. Later.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

I’m addicted to it. A word of advise before I start though, get a joystick for this game. I haven’t got one yet, but I might soon. Controlling it with your keyboard’s D-Pad is very tough. The plane keeps on tilting to either direction even if you take your finger off the keys. It’s annoying to the point I use autopilot very often and it’s extremely difficult to align for landing. You’ve got no feel of the aircraft unless you use a joystick.

Ok then. It’s very realistic in other ways. Controls, landscaping, Sim Objects, Air Traffic Control, everything. There are so many things to explore on a single aircraft. The game comes with 24 aircraft by default but there’s limitless downloads on the internet. You can fly the classic but ever-popular even now Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Not only that, you can fly them under so many airline companies. The standard game without downloads has the Boeing house colours and some virtual airline liveries. Again, you can download more, like Singapore Airlines, UPS and many, many more. And it gets more diverse because each company doesn’t have just one type of livery. They have tons! Well, here are some screenshots from the game. I’ll add in captions and stuff here and there.

Singapore Airlines Flight 2372 heavy on approach to Changi from KLIA. Descending slowly on autopilot.

You don’t just get to be at the command of passenger airliners but also cargo freighters like this UPS Beoing 747.

Or you can opt for your national airline. In this case, Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 747-400 in Hibiscus livery heading for Kingsford Smith International, Sydney.

Of course, there aren’t just the common but large Boeing 747s. There’s also this even larger and technologically advanced Airbus A380-800.

Qantas’ Airbus A380 awaiting confirmation from Kingsford Smith International’s tower for pattern entry and approach instructions while circling and descending on a busy day.

There’s also a British Airways A380 available for download from avsim online. For free of course. Only the super-precise virtual aircrafts will cost you some money.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add that neither British Airways nor Qantas have an A380 in their fleet. It’s virtual. Only Singapore Airlines has the A380 in their fleet.

Or you can have a smaller, more nimble commercial airliner.

Like this KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Boeing 737-400 Classic.

Boeing 777. Very long range.

The aircrafts are not just detailed outside, but also inside. That’s your workspace, hey.

Flight Simulator X gets so realistic to the point you have to communicate with the control tower, or air traffic controllers before taking off/landing. Of course, in free flight you don’t have to. But it adds to the realism. Also, you don’t just take off and land. You also do ground operations.

“What’s up?”. At KLIA. Grounded from taking-off because of heavy downpours. Yes, you can customize weather, or get updated ones every 15 minutes to make it even more real. Yes, that jetway can be extended to your aircraft. As a bonus to players, the view from above is a spectacle to behold. And it’s very realistic.

Shortly after taking off from Vancouver.

Above clouds at 43,000 feet.

Heading for reporting base.

I’d say get it if you’re a flying fanatic. Oh and throw in a joystick. I know this post isn’t really my typical one. I need a break. I’m stressed. Shit.