Lumilon Photography

Here’s my latest athlete portrait of a mountain biker. Find more portraits of athletes on my portfolio website lumilon.com.

Here’s an impressive photo essay in the WSJ about homeless people in San Francisco who manage to stay connected to the internet.

Unfortunately, Canon decided to drop the interval capture function when they went from the G9 to the G10 PowerShot. I’ve found an intervalometer for the Canon G10 camera on eBay. It’s called Yongnuo MC-36b timer remote controller. Besides to certain Canon cameras, it also fits Pentax and Samsung cams.

Ordered it one week ago on a Saturday from a shop in Hong Kong, the seller shipped it same day -- one week later it arrived here. Functions as described. About $33 bucks. No shipping cost. That’s China.

The intervalometer connects to the G10 via 2.5mm stereo jack. It also serves as a cable remote release, for example for bulb captures or macro shots. In case you wonder: yes, you can also connect PocketWizard to the 2.5mm jack for remote triggering the G10.

Together with the G10 cam it’s a great little gadget: it’s small, lightweight, and for time lapse photography it’s easier to carry a smaller camera like the Canon G10 than a large DSLR such as my Nikon D3. Especially for hiking in the mountains. One more plus: there are no dust spots on the Canon G10 sensor – it’s a pain when you discover spots on 720 time lapse captures shot with a DSLR…

A friend asked me to photograph his wedding… To share the photos I tried out animoto to turn the captures in a slideshow video with music. Additionally, I uploaded the photos to Joomeo which has a cool slideshow function (more about photo sharing sites in a recent post). Joomeo also lets other party guests order prints.

Have a look at my latest time lapse video. Watch it in HD on Vimeo…

Jurassic Time from lumilon on Vimeo.

My AF Nikkor 24-70mm/f2.8 seems to show some irregularities when I take large series of captures for time lapse movies (around 300 to 700 exposures). Approximately one out of ten captures is a bit lighter then all the other captures. These captures add some flickering to the resulting time lapse movies. My other lenses do not show this problem.Of course, all settings were manual (exposure, white balance, focus) as described here on my blog: Creating Time-lapse Movies.

I’ll see what Nikon Support says…  Have you experienced something similar?

Not only in music it’s important to press the right keys…

onOne has developed an iPhone app – called DSLR Remote – that allows you to remotely trigger your Canon DSLR camera. It even lets you control shutter speed, aperture, and white balance via WiFi. Also possible is bulb mode for ong exposures. You can even get a live stream of the camera’s viewfinder on your iPhone. Included is an intervalometer so you can do time lapse photography. The cam has to be tethered to your laptop though. Same for Nikon may come later.

How important is it to press the right keys… Not only for a piano player!

The difficulty with this shot were 1) to get the white keys white but preserve an even whiter background, and 2) get straight lines without too much distortion.

Most photo editing applications allow to add captions and title and keywords to photos. The info is stored in the IPTC info in JPG/TIFF/RAW files and can be used by editorial staff.

Here’s a typical configuration of the IPTC info for photos uploaded to a news or sport photo agency. The screenshot is from Apple Aperture, but any other editing software like Photo Mechanic, Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom will do the same.

Headline should be a brief synopsis of the caption. Headline is not the same as Title which is a shorthand reference for the item. Description provides a caption for the image. Keywords express the subject of the content and may be free text and don’t have to be taken from a controlled vocabulary. The field Source indicates the copyright holder which does not necessarily be the same person as the Creator of the content. Credit Line is the field to be used when published. Don’t forget to include Contact Information.

The IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group has released the public document of the IPTC Standard. You can download a PDF copy of the IPTC Standard Photo Metadata 2008, Document Rev. 2.