awholenother

Thanks to tools like Aperture and Lightroom, what happens to photos after they come off the flash card is now much more predictable than in the past. Whereas it used to be that just about everyone had a different way of organizing their digital negatives, choosing formats, keeping track of originals and edits, and doing all the other things that need to be done to get a final product out the door, these types of applications have adopted a convention-over-configuration attitude. Even though lots of little choices are being made by the software, in general they’re making them in a transparent way, and still leaving some of the specifics up to the user.

It’s not to say that as soon as you choose Lightroom instead of Aperture you’re stuck with one workflow for the rest of your life. There’s plenty of flexibility built in so you can do things one way for the weddings you shoot, and a completely different way for managing your family Christmas snapshots. The niceties that you don’t have control over are the things like catalog metadata management and handling multiple versions of a single photo; things you probably don’t want to be dealing with anyway.

I’m going to go over just one workflow, that I commonly use for dealing with sports photography, but it is basically destination agnostic and could probably work well for any workflow that starts with a large volume of images coming in at one time. I will talk a bit about how I manage my files on the hard drive, the ways I use various features of Lightroom, and some of the custom conventions I have decided on that help me get things done.

Read the rest of this article »

I recently picked up a couple Joby Gorilla Pods, which, if you’re unfamiliar, are small tripods built with segmented, rubberized legs that articulate allowing you to stand them up or clamp them to just about anything. They come in several sizes, each with a different weight allowance, and the two I got were the SLR (800g) and the SLR-Zoom (3,000g). I’ve found the names most accurately describe the model below whichever they’re trying to; the SLR model can certainly hold even a large SLR sometimes, but there are lots of cases (read: most) where it’s just too weak. Likewise with the SLR-Zoom, I can fiddle with the configuration of the legs and find a way to support a D700 with a 70-200, but most setups will just topple over; it will hold any SLR with a smaller lens just fine though. The weight recommendations are pretty precise though, so go by those and not the names and you’ll be fine. I bought each Pod with a pretty specific purpose in mind, so I took the gear I was planning on using with each and weighed it before making any purchases.

Firstly, I was looking to get a small, portable, versatile support for was to hold a remote strobe. This could be in a gym replacing the standard magic arm or super clamp, or outside where you can use just about anything to hold the pod: a tree, a fence, the ground, etc. The beastly Sb-900, with batteries and diffuser, weighs in at 545 grams, way outside the range of the Original Gorilla Pod. The next step up is the SLR, so having the 200+ gram allowance was certainly OK with me. B&H (and I’m sure others) sell a kit that includes the  SLR, which includes a built-in quick release system, and a hot shoe insert for that QR, so out of the box for $40 it was ready to do what I needed it to. The SLR model has two articulation segments above the legs, and each of the three legs has 10 segments.

Just as a matter of stress testing, I figured the legs are the weakest when they’re straight, so I checked what the most extreme angle this could handle with an SB-900. 90° is straight up, and 0° would be horizontal. In each test I held the only the last two segments furthest from the head, so there was nearly as little support not coming from the strength of the links as possible. Holding one leg by the last two segments at 90°, the pod is surprisingly steady. Even with a little shaking, the leg held its shape. Once you tip the setup even 3-8° it fails pretty dramatically. If you add in a second leg, again holding them by the last two segments, you can get maybe 15° before they start to curl over. With the third leg, though, 90° is a piece of cake. I won’t say rock solid, but very, very solid is definitely applicable. You can hold the whole setup parallel to the ground probably forever and it I think it would hold it’s shape.

Now obviously those tests were not very telling of any real world application of the device, since normally the legs will be tightly wrapped around something providing a lot more support than the last two segments of each leg alone can provide. You can also set the Pod up as a small tripod, and there, too, it provides adequate support. If you keep the legs perfectly straight, and keep them within maybe 25-30° of perpendicular to the ground, the won’t have trouble supporting the SB-900 regardless of how it’s positioned on the head (the whole thing may topple over if put too much weight in between legs, but that’s gravity, not the Pod). Once you get past 30°, you’ll start to see some slumping in the middle of the legs if you try to keep them perfectly straight, but you’ll quickly figure out ways of bending them to create more ground contact, and give them more of an natural arch, and they’ll be perfectly fine. Except in these extreme testing cases, there will always be a way of creating a rock solid support for something as heavy as a SB-900.

The SLR-Zoom model, rated at up to 3kg, looks significantly beefier than the SLR model, and does not include any segments above where the legs join. Instead it has a screw mount for a compact tripod head. BH offers a $60 kit that comes with a pretty OK Slik (SBH-120) ball head, which is what I picked up. As far as I can tell the head will surpass the Pod, so I’m not going to test it’s limits specifically; I haven’t seen it budge a bit with anything up to 3kg when really clamped down.

I mainly was looking to use this Pod as a remote camera support, again much like a super clamp would be used, but even with having never used a Gorilla Pod, I was hopefully it would eliminate the need for having both a clamp and a small tripod for different situations. My testing was done using a D700 (1100g, with battery), and MB-D10 grip (500g with a Kosmo battery) and a Nikkor 14-24 (1,014g) totaling 2,628 grams, or 88% of the 3k limit.

The SLR-Zoom did not do as well as the SLR in the extreme tests. Holding all three legs about halfway up provides enough support to keep the setup parallel to the ground. Anything less than that is just about useless. Even when I tried to setup a regular tripod shape with this much weight on it, it collapsed, or at least started to bend pretty quickly. If I let it sit for a few minutes, it just kind of slowly melted all the way to the ground. Since I wanted to use this as a set-it-and-forget-it kind of remote, I needed to find some configuration of the legs that was stable enough to allow the ball head to hold the camera even at a pretty extreme angle. Even splaying the legs out at 120° flat on the ground resulted in lots of toppling over unless you got things just right. Eventually I found that if you curl the legs up, creating sort of a Mickey Mouse shape, with each curl being as flat on the ground as possible, you get a very, very stable support at most angles and with quite a bit of leniency in how precisely everything was arranged. If you really tilt the camera back on the ball head, putting all the weight over just two of the legs (so the lens is looking straight up at the sky), I haven’t found any way to get the Pod to hold that on it’s own (and not due to just toppling over, the legs are actually giving out). If you set the legs up in just the right way, and put something heavy enough on the front leg as a counterweight, you can do just about anything.

I also have done a bit of testing with a Nikkor 70-200 on the SLR-Zoom, and if you mount the ball head to mounting hole towards the back of the collar mount you can get a pretty good range of angles, but the weight distribution changes when you move things around, it’s not really that stable in general. You should be able to get just about any angle you want if you mess with different leg configurations and which mounting screw hole you choose.

Both of these Gorilla Pods live up to the technical specs that they are listed at. Like I mentioned before, the names are a bit ambitious, but that’s really a non-issue. They are versatile, allow you to place strobes or cameras even where other dedicated supports like a super clamp might be tough or impossible. The trade off is obviously with support and security. I would not be trusting one of these to hold a remote on a catwalk; even if you’re doubling or tripling up the security straps, the potential even just for not getting the images you want is probably too high to not invest in a more dedicated solution. Also, I will have to see how much strength these lose over time with use. I haven’t heard anything like that happening, but I also haven’t heard of too many everyday professionals using these as part of the regular gear, so they may have not been tested enough to make that conclusion yet. I certainly think for the price, and specifically for the uses I got them for they will serve their function well, now that I’ve figured out their limits and the best ways of using them.

I put this together using about 700 of the 1100 photos I took last Friday at the meet. I had put together a similar video from the previous week, but this time I shot the event basically with this as the final result in mind, so I put a few hours of work into it. I had to chose between shooting JPEG and not worrying about space on my cards, or going with RAW and having a better chance of offsetting the terrible lighting is post. I went with RAW and just barely got away with it; I walked out with 6 photos remaining on 13gig of cards.

2009 MIAA All-State Championships T+F Championships in 90 seconds from Chris Kalafarski on Vimeo.

After getting everything into Lightroom, I knew I wasn’t going to spend the time going stack by stack and getting the exposure and WB perfect (there was a pretty big variation from one side of the track to the other) so I made up a preset that was a good compromise in most cases. The first time through the photos I eliminated stacks that I knew weren’t going to make the final cut; either there were too few keepers to make a good motion picture of the race, even with more manual editing the colors weren’t going to be saved, or the shots were too similar to others (back to back heats from the same location) that would have just made the video boring.

I ended up with about 80 “takes”, which I went through photo by photo and cropped and did any final developing. When cropping, I made sure each stack visualized a nice movement of the focused runner across the frame. This was tougher in head-on shots, so getting a progressive scale was more important there. I also dropped some unnecessary frames from the beginning and end of certain stacks. At this point all the frames that ended up in the video except for about 10 were finalized.

I exported to JPEG and brought all them into After Effects. I wish there were some sort of ‘export stacks to separate folders’ option, which would have saved a lot of time in the next step, but oh well. I dropped the whole bunch into a comp, sequenced them, and then when through stack by stack and pre-comped them, so it would easy to reorder things. For longer races where I had four or five takes, they all ended up in one comp. I overlooked the timecode at this point, and ended up with comps at 30fps and each image was three frames. It obviously made more sense just to have each image be one frame and drop the frame rate to match the image rate (I decided to be 7, maybe could have gone with 6 to slow some of the quicker shots down).

So after going back through and fixing that, I found a few races that had several heats, meaning I had a single athlete running the same thing, but from different angles. I spliced them together to make things more interesting, and also to decrease the number of times a few athletes/teams showed up, because it was somewhat out of balance. After mucking around with the order of clips for a while, I found something I liked, so I synced up the music, added a title and called it a wrap.

Total time was probably about four or five hours. If I were to do it again I could probably get the same quality in about three hours, but would probably do a little more work in Lightroom to get the colors and cropping a little more consistent.

The EN-EL3e battery that comes with D300 can only get the camera shuttering at six frames a second, and let’s be honest, that just isn’t fast enough. Dropping another few hundred dollars to get the EN-EL4a and charger to get up to nine fps is a little ridiculous, though.

Enter the Phottix Kosmo. Not only is it a battery on par with the EN-EL4a, getting you those last few precious fps, but it also does away with the need for the BL-3 battery chamber cover required to get the EL4 to fit properly in the MB-D10. The rest of the story gets pretty sketchy. The Kosmo’s main hangout is eBay, and they are shipped straight out of Hong Kong. Shipping takes a good while, and I wouldn’t expect too much tech support if something were to go wrong with this guy. 

The charger is pretty unusual for a camera battery. Instead of the standard cradle approach, it just have a little cover over a DC jack, so you plug an adapter right in. This sounds convenient, and considering you don’t need to carry around another bulky (in the case of a EL4, a very bulky) cradle since you’ll probably still be using an EL3, I guess in a way it is. But the thought of having a strange power cable plugged directly into a battery still in my camera doesn’t sit well, so I always end up taking the battery out to charge it. The included AC adapter has EU prongs, so you’ll need a travel adapter, and that’s been nothing but inconvenient. I found a US adapter of equal wattage and voltage in my box of cables, but the jack was too large for the plug on the Kosmo. The larger jack that I had seemed to be standard, so I don’t know where they found the adapter that was included. My last big gripe with the battery is that the little rubber cover protecting the DC jack doesn’t instill much confidence in the way of weatherproofing. I think that when it’s seated properly it will do a decent job of keeping out moisture, but it doesn’t really have the grippy feeling other rubber covers on electronics have, so I go out of my way to keep on a on it and make sure it’s where it should be.

I haven’t done much in the way of testing capacity, or compared it to the EL3 (and I don’t have a EL4). I would say it probably runs out a little more quickly over the same number of frames, and a lot more quickly over the same time period — those three extra fps add up.

Lastly, nine frames every second is silly. But fun.

Pros:

• Carrying the camera over your should is a lot better for two reasons. First, it is free to rotate so you can stick it behind your back which makes getting into tight spaces and through crowds a lot less of a hassle. Also, since the camera is hanging upside down, if you’ve got a flash on the hotshoe it isn’t awkwardly under your arm getting knocked around; it’s conveniently hanging down by your pocket.
• Using it in the intended x-chest manner is definitely as nice as advertised. The grip is right where you’d want it to quickly reach down and grab it, and as soon as you’re done shooting the camera gets out of your way.
• I now much prefer having the strap mounted to a long lens, so that when I switch to a short one the 70-200 or whatever stays right where I need it, rather than having the strap on the camera and trying to juggle two loose lenses and a bag.
• The padding makes a nice ad-hoc knee pad when you’re going to be in the same spot for a few minutes

Cons:

• My biggest complaint is how difficult getting the clasp onto the provided L bracket is. At first I figured this was just a good way of making sure things didn’t start falling off, but (unless I’m doing something wrong) it could be just as secure and be a little easier to get on. Granted, I’m not doing this all the time, but every time I do it takes three or for tries to get things lined up. Certainly wouldn’t be an issue with a tripod QR.
• I find that the should pad tends to creep down my chest pretty quickly. Maybe after bringing the camera up to shooting position 10 times I’ll have to reset the pad. It doesn’t really get in the way until it’s like all the way down and when you try to bring the camera up instead of having the flexible nylon mesh just moving out of the way, you’re contending with a pretty solid shoulder pad and things get kind of awkward. I think maybe if the pad were a bit contoured this would be less of an issue, so maybe it will go down with use.

All-in-all, very happy.