Posts in Photography

Putrajaya Night walkabout

Photography

On the first day of Eid (or Hari Raya), we went with a couple of friends for a tweetup to take some photos of Putrajaya at night. One of them had recently got a good deal on a used D90 and wanted to dabble into photography. Photography is best enjoyed with friends (hence the launching of our Church Photo club soon) so off we went to Puchong for curry fish head dinner followed by a scenic drive to Putrajaya.

We arrived at the main Putrajaya mosque first and found the garden area heavily barricaded. It took a while to find some decent viewpoints. We had better fun shooting flashlight drawings and other stuff. Then again, Putrajaya doesn’t inspire me that much as I find it rather soulless.

I just love this last shot by the way of Li Tsin walking into the unknown… like a mysterious stranger scene in a movie opener. Hmm, in fact, I’ve a full HD video of this same scene sans Li Tsin unfortunately.

RadioPopper PX + Lastolite EzyBox Hotshoe

Photography 13 Comments

Lastolite makes plenty of nifty lighting accessories and the EzyBox hotshoe is one of them. I’ve been shooting with softboxes for sometime but they were studio lights requiring AC power. Needless to say, they aren’t easily setup or transported. Plus they need the all-important AC socket. Sometimes, those AC sockets aren’t easily available and I’ve a daisy-chain-able extension cord and sockets. In some cases, you don’t even have AC power so Lastolite’s EzyBox hotshoe comes to the rescue. Some samples here from Louis Pang. It basically allows you to use your flash in a softbox.


RadioPoppers – well, they’re those god-sent help for wireless remote flash triggers with full e-TTL (or i-TTL) capability. Don’t understand? Well, it allows simpletons like me to use the camera’s brain when calculating flash exposure when the flash is not sitting on the camera but hanging from a Justin clamp several meters away. Better yet, several flash units all over the place.

So what’s the problem? I want to use my Canon 580EX II with my RadioPopper PX reciever inside my EzyBox Hotshoe. Here lies the problem. I’ve searched, posted on Facebook and Twitter to no avail. I’ve asked a couple of other people here in Malaysia but still no go. Brick walls are roadblocks but any roadblock is surmountable…

Read further for the solution… Read More

Storage & Backup again

Photography 1 Comment

Seems like there’s a raft of people I know who recently lost some stuff due to disk crashes or are looking at ways to store that ever growing pile/stack/stash/gigabytes/terabytes/petabytes of data that people nowadays are generating. Even non-photographer friends I have are either busy downloading TV series or accumulating lots of media here and there such as e-books, songs, photos of their children, etc. Generally, media is usually the biggest culprit. I mean how large can a collection of excel spreadsheets or word documents be?

My approach is a two-tier storage system with my QNAP NAS playing primary on-line storage and a custom-built machine serving as the full storage backup. The following is a simple sketch of my network with my QNAP and my storage server. They’re connected to my Cisco switch using Link Aggregation (802.3ad) which offers both redundancy and faster transfer speeds. The little diagram on the right is how my content is stored between the server and the NAS. In a nutshell, my main storage server contains everything but the NAS has a little sub-set of the data.

Basically, my server stores everything in 1TB & 1.5TB disks, mirrored of course. I use rsync/robocopy to mirror as I’ve mentioned much earlier about using cheaper RAID cards. The mirrored pair is exposed on the network with one disk primarily for reading and the other for writing. What basically happens is that I back up to my NAS and my Storage Server (when it’s switched on – which is like at least a few times a week), pulls the backup from the NAS. When working on photos (especially for paid clients), I usually back-up simultaneously to both my QNAP and my Storage server. You can see below where I have my disks…

In case you are wondering (which you will), my disks are all short-stroked. My two swap disks are 150Gb 10,000rpm Raptor disks. Also, if you noticed, my storage server seems rather short of space… well, that’s because all the files are using NTFS junction points since I don’t have a RAID array… there’s actually 3 sets of mirrored disks. Total capacity is 1TBx 2 and 1.5TB x 4 / 2 due to the mirror. Usable capacity is about 3.4TB. Using junction points, 2001 and 2002 directories can reside on Pair A while 2003 and 2004 can be actually on Pair B. A bit complex but cost wise, all you need is a system with more than 4 SATA ports and you’re set. Recovery is also easier. Currently, the Samsung HD154UI 5,400rpm 1.5TB disks are good value but I’ll be moving away from them considering their slow-as-snail spin-up time and generally overall poor performance. I’m testing Hitachi’s affordable (runs a little hot though) 2TB, 5-platter, 7K2000 drive and see if it’ll give me back some performance lost to the Samsungs. Green drives may consume less power but the slow speed may result in high power consumption if we end up leaving more systems on just to complete back-ups and disks synchronization.

So far, I’ve been satisfied with my Seagate 7200.12 1TBs but looking for 1.5TB and 2TB drives are tough if you’re trying to avoid the green marketing crap.

My niece, Julia, OMF, Camerons

Photography 2 Comments

Children in some ways are easier to shoot that adults. Of course, there’s a different set of challenges and also not everyone’s the same. Like adults, some are more comfortable in front of the camera. Recently, I was at Camerons and while relaxing and also planning out some big changes ahead as well as a lot of calendar packing events — including a large photo seminar for university students as well as the upcoming Shoot4Charity fund raiser. My niece Julia was there and she’s a gregarious kid and rather happy to be in front of the camera. She proudly exclaims “I’m shooting pictures!”. Best part is she’s able to tell my 5D Mark II, battery grip, 70-200 f2.8 compared to daddy’s 500D and 18-200, “Your camera is much bigger than daddy’s!” Size does matter?

The OMF bungalow has a nice open area for kids to run around. It’s also a good time to think, reflect and plan for the future. Change is definitely on the horizon. Most of the shots were flash assisted with my RadioPoppers, even some of the daylight ones as I wanted more directional lighting.

Julia found the older kids (another group who was also staying in the bungalow with us) playing football (soccer) but they didn’t want her to play plus also they were kicking much harder. The only time we had was later in the evening about dinner time (around 7pm) when the kids went in for their dinner. I kinda of like those shots where I had to drag the shutter down quite a bit. You can see the slow shutter in the shots — I was going down to 1/30 at f/4.5, ISO 1250 in those shots. Some shots had 3 580EX IIs going off to provide enough light but as I didn’t move my lights around, some shots had to make do with a single flash (the others were off position).















Creative Asia Photography Conference

Photography

World Class learning at an affordable and accessible price! Not only that, being in KL means much cheaper accommodation and travel costs for Malaysians especially if you compare to conferences and workshops in the US such as WPPI.

So why, wait? Sign up for the conference or a workshop or two today!

RadioPopper troubleshooting

Photography

My RadioPopper PX transmitters and receivers so far have been functioning great. Stuff that simply works is always a winner in my book. The only problem is that due to its usage of the 900Mhz ISM Band (902-928Mhz to be precise) it’s not available outside the US. This is generally due to GSM 900 being in used in many countries outside the US. GSM 900 technically spans from 890-921Mhz. RadioPoppers translate the e-TTL (or i-TTL) signal of your flash over radio instead of IR to allow the signals to go beyond line-of-sight such as behind walls, etc.

Anyways, I’ve never had problems using my RadioPoppers in Malaysia or Shanghai so… Most radio devices are also capable of working with the noise and I’ve used my RPs in a filled church hall, 100 feet from master to slave flash clamped above the gallery and they still work with full e-TTL and HSS (High-speed sync).

Realized I had the battery covers swapped – The transceiver is actually the receiver and vice-versa.

A friend had some issues with his RPs lately so I got hold of them and obviously, test them before I get one of my friends going to the US to get them sent in. So here’s how to check if your RPs are working fine.

Hardware Reset
First thing I do is to reset them. You do that by pressing X and then press P a couple of times until you reach the Reset menu. You’ll need to hold down the X till the countdown happens.

Reset, reset, reset!

After that, powering on the unit will display the firmware version. I then configure them to my usually preferences; Hardware mode: Canon, Brightness Level 1 (those darn LEDs drain power), Channel 9, Feedback Mode 2 (F2 – no feedback to allow 8FPS shooting). Don’t ask me why but channel 9 works for me all the time so far. Furthest range I’ve got is from the road to my backyard, approximately 130 feet with the whole house, truck in the driveway between master and slave.

Feedback Mode (F3)
Since I’m trying to figure out what was the problem, I set Feedback to ‘3’ which shows the the signal transmitted from master to slave. This code is displayed on master and slave. Easy to figure out if anything’s messing up or going haywire. This worked fine with numbers matching. So I dug out the rest of my RadioPoppers and then tried both the transmitter and receiver and all units synced up nicely. You will get a number, i.e. 11, 15, etc — it depends on your shoot settings but that number will be displayed on all receivers and transmitters. If it doesn’t match, you might have some issues.

Testing
Finally, the test was to test from 1/160 to 1/2500 with one, two and three slave flash units. Camera A is a 5D Mark II with 550EX as master and camera B is a 40D with 580EX as master. Slaves are 430EX IIs and 580EX IIs. Transmitters and receivers on channel 9. After 200+ shots, I got tired so, case closed. The shot below was taken from outside my house window, into the corridor with three flash units in each room. Distance to the last flash, 60 feet, 5D Mark II, f/6.3, 1/160, ISO 400, 105mm. You’ll need to look carefully to see the light from each flash. Anyways, test result shows that all transmitters and receivers work fine.

p.s. sorry about the silly bathroom rug 🙂