2ni’s Blog

I’ll do some outdoor car photography in the next coming days. I already took some pictures but I’ll need to optimize my shooting a little.

Lessons I learned during the shooting or read on tutorials so far:

• Use a polarizing filter to prevent reflections (will get one)
• Shoot at about headlight level (get on your knees)
• Ratio between front and side of car 1:3
• Turning the wheels to one direction can give the photo more dynamic
• Try to have the sun in your back
• Use your flash as filling light
• Background should be as least distracting as possible, no bright colors

Take at least the following shots: front 3/4 view, rear 3/4 view, full side view, full front view, full rear view, engine shot, dashboard and interior shot. Then try different shots for yourself.

Eventually take 2 shots with different exposure to get everything right.

Check also out this and this.

My broken lens just came back! Wow, that went fast. Cleaned and repaired. Everything seems to be fine again. I just don’t know yet how much it’ll cost. There was no invoice with the parcel.
But I’m happy so far. Great and fast service.

The autofocus of my sigma lens 70-200/2.8 seems to be broken. I just hear some tic-tic-tic-tic from the lens when half-pushing the trigger. About every 20th time the autofocus kicks in.

Unfortunately I have no warranty anymore. So I had to find out about the technical assistance and service in Switzerland. Not the easiest task I’ve ever done… But here it is:

OTT + WYSS AG
Napfweg 3
Postfach
CH-4800 Zofingen
Tel: 062 746 01 00
http://www.owy.ch/

I tried to contact them, but didn’t get any answer by e-mail and nobody answered the phone either. Hm. So I wrote an e-mail to the CEO. And I finally got an answer.

I sent my lens to them today. Let’s see how long the repair will take and how much it’ll cost

Today I met with some flickr people at ETH Hönggerberg to learn about shooting outdoor with flashes. That’s what came out from me and that’s from the other photographers…

What I learned in short:

- Strobist is very funny and not that difficult.
- Working with cactus triggers means not shooting faster than 1/200
- I absolutely need a 10-20mm lens (thanks to Eke for borrowing his).
- I need to find out, how to set up my flash SB-600 in "light triggering"
- You can use Migros Röhrli to make a simple and effective directional flash

It was very funny and informative. Thanks to everybody and especially to the organizers Beat and Mark and the 4 models!

Ich habe vor ein paar Tagen beim Rumklettern im Seilpark Rigi ein Objektivdeckel verloren.

Dachte, das sei kein Problem, könne man einfach irgendwo kaufen. Denkste. Nach einigem unendlichlangem Suchen im Web, bin ich schlussendlich bei amazon fündig geworden. Hab gleich 5 davon gekauft, denn die scheinen mit Innengriff sowieso einfacher bedienbar. Zudem lassen sie sich abnehmen und anfügen, auch wenn die Sonnenblende montiert ist.

If you don’t own a camera with GPS, but you are in possession of a GPS tracker (such as Garmin Edge), you can still geo tag your pictures quite easily.

On the last excursion I tried to geotag my photos.
It didn’t work (on flickr), because you first have to activate your account to allow Flickr processing the GPS exif information. I don’t know why, flickr does not use that information from the beginning?!? Maybe some strange privacy thoughts…

I used my Garmin Edge 705 bicycle computer to geotag my photos as follows:

1. Set the time of your camera as the one on the garmin. (Eventually you might set recording data to “1sec” instead of “automatic”, for better gps precision on the photos later)
2. When you’re ready to shoot, just start your track on the garmin. (You might configure and select another “bike” definition to not fake your total distance count of your real bicycle)
3. When finished shooting, just stop your track on the garmin.
4. Use a software to automatically add the gps information to your pictures.
5. Do whatever you want with them, i.e. upload them to flickr and check the map!

I use GPS Photo Linker for now on my mac. I’ll try with another photo session, if now also works on flickr, after I have activated my account for geotagging.