Suffer for my art

This weekend makes twice in the last year I've been painfully bitten by bugs while doing photography.

I was first bitten by a wasp last summer wile standing on a beach at Lake Tahoe at 11:00 pm. What kind of wasp bites people in the middle of the night? The resulting picture is here:

Then just this past Sunday while I was lying on my belly in a field I picked up a tick that burrowed into my torso. I was only on my belly for one photo so I'm pretty sure I know exactly which picture I was taking when I picked this guy up:

That picture was taken after expert extraction by my lovely wife.  Her comment was "are you going to pass out now?"  (I didn't)   I find it ironic that I was on a field trip for a class on shooting macro photography when I picked this up, giving me the perfect opportunity to take a picture of something very small!   The picture above is really just a snapshot taken quickly in the kitchen - not a lot of setup involved.   It's not exactly professional quality, but I wasn't really in my right frame of mind at the time.

The picture I was taking while lying on his home is here:

Also not really top-rate but I'm including it here for completeness' sake.   I guess this is all the more reason to spend $200 and pick up the Canon angle view finder attachment - because sometimes kneeing is way better than lying down on your belly...

Replaced the GPS

My friend Philip commented in the post I made about losing my GPS that I should just get another Garmin Legend HCx, since they have gotten more affordable.  I looked at the newer Oregon/Dakota models but I ended up taking Philip's advice and just getting another one of the exact same thing I had before. I went to a store and played with the newer Colorado and Dakota models and came to the conclusion that they weren't really improvements over the eTrex line.

The eTrex line is proven as a good tool.  Sure, they're not perfect but they're pretty good.   The only real complaints I have are the screen is dark without the backlight on and the joystick sticks up too far and keeps moving around when I put it in a pocket.   Other than that, it's pretty much fine.

The newer models show quite a bit of "improvement" from the "slickness" department.  The main change is the touch screen and the new "friendly" UI.   You know how there' Lego blocks, and then there's Duplo for the younger kids?  The eTrex User Interface is Lego and the Dakota is Duplo.   The touchscreen is very "eh...".   I have an iphone so I know what touchscreens are supposed to be like.   This is not responsive or accurate like that.  I have no idea what would happen if you were wearing gloves.

Then there's the new and improved larger, bulkier size.   And the crappier battery life.

Wait - It costs more too?

You see where I'm going with this...   I hope they never discontinue the eTrex.   You should buy one.  (as long as it accepts a micrSD card for recording tracks to.)

Attending Macro/Food/Close-up photo class this weekend

I'm looking forward to attending a photo workshop at Keeble and Shuchat this weekend about close-ups, macro, food, flowers, etc.   The workshop will be led by a guy named Dave Henry, who I haven't met before.   It's sponsored by Canon and there will be a lot of Canon gear there to borrow but I'm hoping the content will be mostly brand-agnostic. More info is available in this PDF here: http://www.kspphoto.com/files/macro_henry.pdf

You can see other classes that Keeble and Schuchat hosts here:  http://www.kspphoto.com/photo_classes.html

Anyone else planning to attend?

Transferring blog archives, and Dubai

Migrating archives from old blog

Things are moving along well with the blog here at Brian Johns Photography World Headquarters.   One month in and I'm pretty happy with the new Wordpress setup.  It beats the hell out of the old custom pile of code...

I'm making slow progress on transferring old blog entries from the old system into Wordpress though.   The old system was totally proprietary and all I have from it is a mysql dump file, so I'm entering the blog entries into Wordpress one at a time.   I'm taking the time to edit here and there, as well as add some pictures.   I'm transferring articles in some approximate priority order.  The articles I feel are most important have been moved.

I find the media library in Wordpress to be a bit slow to use.  I was embedding links to Flickr and Photoshelter in the past but I'm trying to get away from that and become more self-reliant.   That means exporting pictures from Lightroom to my hard drive, uploading to Wordpress, and then placing the picture in the posts.   I wonder if there's a Wordpress plugin for Lightroom...

Dubai

I was thinking of going to Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai this week to catch lectures by Joey Lawrence and a few other great photogs.  Unfortunately the cost of the conference has really gone up so I didn't end up making it.   There are various other plans for international photography brewing though, so stay tuned for more on that front.

Lost Garmin GPS

I seem to have lost my beloved Garmin eTrex HCx, which I use for geotagging, as well as driving directions and other useful things.   I love geotagging so much that I'm going to have to replace it.   I've got a Garmin fitness watch with a GPS (the Forerunner 305) and I can extract .gpx files from it in a pinch, so I'm not totally out of luck.   But I see a new Dakota 20 in my future soon.

Keep in mind that if you're going to do geotagging with photos after the fact, you need a GPX (or similar) file.   The easiest way to get a GPX file that I know of is to use a Garmin GPS with a microSD card.   There's a mostly-hidden feature you can enable that just writes .gpx files to the microSD card whenever the unit is on.   These files are invisible to the unit's UI and aren't related to the "path" memory, and can't be erased via the UI.   The unit just silently creates a track of everywhere it goes, and then you can copy this file to your computer later.

The only downsides seem to be cost and size/weight.   The cost is steep: about $300 for the unit.   I've seen GPS units way cheaper than this but it all boils down to convenience here.   The constant-logging to the GPX file is a really esoteric piece of functionality that not many people are probably interested in.   It's hard to shop around for that feature since most people don't even know that feature exists.   Garmin doesn't even advertize that feature of their own product!

As for size/weight, I'm ambivalent about this point.  Part of me thinks the units is just small enough and part of me is still annoyed that I have to add 6 more ounces and fill one more pocket.   Part of the weight and size comes from the fact that it uses 2 AA batteries and I think that's a Really Good Thing.  As I've said before, I love standards like AA batteries.  Sure, portable electronic devices can be made smaller by using integrated, proprietary battery systems.  (Look at Apple's laptops, which are getting smaller and smaller, partially due to the decision to drop replaceable batteries.)

But I really like AA batteries because in a pinch you can find them anywhere.   You can buy AA batteries in the middle of the jungle in Vietnam.  (I know, I've been there.)  I've stepped out of a wedding reception for 2 minutes to walk across the street and buy a pack of AA batteries at a liquor store before.  For these reasons, I'm willing to accept the slightly larger weight and form factor of the Garmin GPS, since I know I can grab spare power anywhere.

In conclusion, I'll probably be picking up a new GPS soon.  If so, I'll let you know how it works out.

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl Wrap-up

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was going to shoot the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl on January 9th, and indeed I did.   I'll spare you the blow-by-blow details but I want to give a quick summary about how it went and remind myself of a few things for next year.

I had a great time.   The traffic was light, the bowl was a sellout, the crowds were good, and it was a good game.  I got some nice shots and I didn't get hurt.  One fun thing about a football game at AT&T Park is the photo work area is the Ginats' dug-out. Let me rephrase that: the World Champion Giants' dugout.

What more could I ask for?

Well, I guess I could ask for the PAC-10 being able to field enough bowl-eligible teams to fill all of their bowl slots.  It would have been nice to have a PAC-10 team there, but I guess you can't have everything you want.

The Gear

I took a little bit more gear than I have in the past, including a 500mm f/4.0 lens that I was renting from local nature photographer Joe Decker.  Here's a  shot of the camera gear I took:

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff there.  I took 3 bodies and 6 lenses this time.  The larger pack on the right is the ThinkTank Airport International which I absolutely love.  The 500/4.0 just barely fits in there.   Next to it is the 70-200/2.8.   There's a 1-Ds mk III (Yes, that's the slower, larger sensor model instead of  the faster 1-D made for sports.)  There's a 5-D mkII and a 24-70 in there too.

In the middle is an old Tamrac backpack of some sort.  I almost never use it while shooting anymore but it's good for carrying gear around in. That bag holds the 300/4.0 lens, a 40-D body, a 17-40/4.0 wide-angle zoom, a 15mm fisheye, some lens hoods which I never seem to use, my compact flash wallet, etc.

To the far left is my ThinkTank modular belt system, which is what I actually wear when I'm shooting the game.  On top is the monopod which is permanently attached to to 500mm lens during the game.

I took 3 bodies but really only used the 1-Ds mkIII for about 95% of the shots.  Once you use the great focus system on the body you never want to go back to the old 9 point focus system on the other cameras.  There's enough time between plays in football to switch between lenses based on how far away the action of the next play will be, so I just kept switching lenses and always using the 1-D.

The 500mm lens was the longest I've used for shooting football before.  It's a pretty long lens and it really pulls in the action from far away.  Also, due to the narrow angle of view and shallow depth of field, the long telephoto really isolates the action a lot better.  A well framed photo taken with the 500 looks a lot nicer than a heavy crop from a narrower lens.  There's a trick to using a lens that long but when it works, it really looks nice.

The Results

Lightroom has a nice metadata browser that makes it easy to get some informal stats about collections of images.  I ended up with 136 photos of action during the game.  The screengrab on the left shows the lenses I used to take those images.  Although the 500 is the "sexiest" (and most expensive) lens I had it ended up not being the most used, producing around 15% of my "keeper" images.  The good old 70-200 turned out to be the most useful (producing more than 50% of my keepers), followed by the wonderful 300/4.0.

You can see a much larger collection of about 50 images from the game on my flickr page.

The question of Naming...

Finally, I'd like to ask one last question.   To what year do we attribute bowl games played in January?  Is this the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2010?  Or how about the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011?  Sure, it happened in 2011 but it's the bowl game attached to the 2010 season.   Back when it was the Emerald Bowl and it happened in late December there was no problem.  I checked my photo passes from previous years and sure enough - they all have the year in them.  This year's official bowl title is simply "The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl".  No year specified, so maybe they don't even know what to call it.   What's it going to be called next year?

One last thing...

Those of you who follow my blog know I've always had a thing for a good fisheye shot.  Ever since I started shooting at AT&T Park I've had a vision of a wide shot that included the whole stadium with a view of the field, the scoreboard, the bay behind, etc.   Now that I'm rockin' the full-frame camera and the fisheye lens, I could go ahead and get it.   There wasn't that great of a sunset that night, but here it is:

That's probably it for sports until next year!