The thought was to move away from the FW400 ports that are no longer supported on my iMac and into some new USB 3 technology. Now I know the iMac only has USB 2 ports, but I was sure that the new SanDisk card reader would stand me in good stead for future computer upgrades.

I have 2 types of card that I currently shoot with: (8GB Lexar Pro UDMA 300x speed and a slower 8GB SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s), but before I cast the old Firewire reader into the rapidly growing box of tech that’s going/gone obsolete (including Zip drives, that’s right kids I said Zip drives!), I thought I’d run a quick data transfer experiment to see how much difference the move to the new reader makes.

Disclaimer: This speed test details only my observations of the data times being written to and downloaded from the CF cards on my computer and results may vary on other machines.

I created a 8GB folder with a mixture of RAW files and Movies and set about testing the read and write capabilities of each reader and card combination.

Here’s how they played out.

Card Reader: SanDisk ImageMate USB 3

CF Card : Lexar Pro 8GB UDMA 300x speed

Write to card:

1 GB – 45 secs

4 GB – 3min 1 sec

8 GB – 6 min

Read from card

1 GB – 28 secs

4 GB – 1 min 52 sec

8 GB – 3 min 43 sec

———————————————-

Card Reader: SanDisk ImageMate USB 3

CF Card : SanDisk Extreme III – 30MB/s

Write to card:

1 GB – 57 secs

4 GB – 3min 49 sec

8 GB – 7min 31 sec

Read from card

1 GB – 35 secs

4 GB – 2 min 17 sec

8 GB – 4 min 34 sec

———————————————-

Card Reader: Lexar Professional Firewire 400

CF Card : Lexar Pro 8GB UDMA 300x speed

Write to card:

1 GB – 2 min 13 secs

4 GB – 8 min 50 sec

8 GB – 17 min 43 sec

Read from card

1 GB – 1 min 51 secs

4 GB – 7 min 16 sec

8 GB – 14 min 27 sec

———————————————-

Card Reader: Lexar Professional Firewire 400

CF Card : SanDisk Extreme III – 30MB/s

Write to card:

1 GB – 1 min 45 secs

4 GB – 7 min 01 sec

8 GB – 14 min 02 sec

Read from card

1 GB – 1 min 32 secs

4 GB – 6 min 8 sec

8 GB – 12 min 14 sec

As expected the SanDisk USB 3 (new tech) is considerably quicker, saving me a reasonable 90 secs on a 1GB download, but almost a staggering 9 minutes on a full 8GB card. Wow. I hadn’t realised that I could save that much time.

Poor old Lexar reader. What is interesting is that on the Lexar Card Reader the SanDisk CF card appeared to out-perform the allegedly quicker Lexar CF card. Not that it matters now anyway.

All this speed testing is now making me think about upgrading my CF cards. Maybe to the new Pro standard 600x speed, but on the very near horizon the major card manufacturers are launching 1000x speed cards. Should be unbelievably fast and I would imagine they have a price tag to match.

I’d love to hear of your experiences and observations. Catch up soon.

My experience as a professional photographer is that once the images have been delivered to the client, the emphasis rapidly moves to the next creative project in the pipeline and quite often the reflection, critique and lesson learning takes a back stage whilst you’re producing work and trying to get paid.

For me the most challenging and rewarding part of this year has been learning to develop an ambient light only mentality and a few projects over the past year have demanded a new ‘non-flash’ approach.

Having worked for many years in hospitals, clinical healthcare and research environments they often require additional light shaping to create images that look clean, sharp with lots of detail and provide a greater than normal depth of field. I have to confess that over the years my default setting has been to reach for the flash gear and use or mix with the ambient as a last result.

However this year I set myself some growth projects to free up my dependancy and develop my commercial photography style. A few of these were personal projects (see below) that would develop a new approach and a few ‘flash prohibited’ work projects to see how I could translate this technique to commercial work.

Personal project - 50mm series

This gave me plenty of opportunity to develop a bunch of new camera techniques to help me pull the most from low light scenes. Yeah sure, you gotta crank the ISO up and boy sometimes really hard, but most importantly choosing areas within the interior environment that offers the best natural light.

Here’s a few examples commercial project just using low level ambient light.

Theatre photography - Anshen+Allen

Course tutor - University of Salford

Camera operator students - Media City UK

Old habits die hard and after 20 years of crafting light from flash, even now I still carry the flash kit round as some sort of comfort blanket, just in case. There are of course some projects/environments that demand the power, control and crispness that only flash can provide ‘out of the box’, however my approach now is to check out the natural possibilities first before breaking out the flash gear.

There are loads of creative projects in the pipeline for the forth-coming year which I’ll tell you about soon, but for now have a great and prosperous 2012.

One of the best things about being an experienced commercial photographer is the ability to see beyond the physical and to dream up exciting concepts that have a wow factor for the client. This project was no different, but it did push my imagination and creativity to a new level.

I’ve been working closely with the University of Salford on a good few projects lately and after creating the images in the last post, they were keen to see what I could make of a couple of rooms that had been photographed previously but needed a fresh pair of creative eyes on them.

The first room I was taken to was the reverberation room, which is a pretty blank room barring a few shaped acoustic boards and microphones suspended from the ceiling. We visited the anechoic chamber next which had a lot more visual interest, pyramid shapes surrounding all the walls and pointing into the centre of the of the room. See images below.

             

The Challenge

Both rooms have been photographed before by other photographers and although the sound dynamic in both is interesting to listen to, the reverberation room is visually bland. Plain walls and ceiling mounted acoustic boards meant that the balance of the room was very top heavy and we’d need to add some visual interest into the middle and bottom thirds to create some balance.

The anechoic chamber had a different set of challenges. The chamber itself has been photographed many times by a variety of photographers, however the challenge was to provide something unique and visually exciting. Although the interior is architecturally pleasing, the monotone colour of the foam dampeners didn’t provide much colour stimulus.

The Creative Thinking

Given the fairly blank canvas we had to work with, I imagined that these rooms would lend themselves to some experimental light painting. I envisaged creating wave forms out of light to emulate sound waves within the spaces. I’d also use the light painting technique to colour the interior walls to provide the much needed colour saturation and drama.

 The Methodology

Armed with a mixture of different size torches, continuous lighting equipment and coloured gels, I set up a sturdy tripod and plunged the rooms into almost total darkness. Pre-focussing the camera, I dialled in a long shutter speed of approx 20secs and set the f-stop to a medium depth of field (f8). Given the relatively short duration of time, I had to work quickly and methodically, making sure not to dwell too in any area otherwise I’d be captured in the image. I decided to capture a number of images of the various elements we wanted to introduce into the final picture and using different lights sources allowed us to produce a broad wash of light and then switching to smaller torches to capture the smaller details. The elements from each frame were then extracted and layered up in Photoshop to create the final composite.

 The Results

I’m really pleased with the final composite images, I hope you like them too. Perhaps in a future post I’ll cover what goes into the compositing of these types of images, but for now I hope you enjoy the images. Click below to see both room images.

If you think you’ve got an un-interesting room or difficult environment to photograph, why not get in touch and I’m sure I can make something special out of it.

Wikipedia references:

“Light painting, also known as light drawing or light graffiti is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera.”

“An anechoic chamber (an-echoic meaning non-echoing or echo-free) is a room designed to stop reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also insulated from exterior sources of noise. The combination of both aspects means they simulate a quiet open-space of infinite dimension, which is useful when exterior influences would otherwise give false results.”

“A reverberation chamber or room is a room designed to create a diffuse or random incidence sound field (i.e. one with a uniform distribution of acoustic energy and random direction of sound incidence over a short time period). The main uses for a reverberation chamber are measurement microphone calibration, measurement of the sound power of a source, and measurement of the absorption coefficient of a material.”

As you all know by now, I get my kicks and giggles from photographing cool technology, scientific gadgets and amazing structures. My last photography project for the University of Salford (UoS) ticked lots of those boxes and I just wanted to share a couple of the experiences from the shoot.

The shoot comprised of mainly photographing students at work in the Aeronautical engineering department at UoS where they design, develop and test using lots of outrageously sophisticated equipment. My main focus was to be on there research on Applied aerodynamic and flight dynamics and also computational Fluid Dynamics. Cool right.

Now I think where I differ from a lot of photographers is that I really love this stuff and the chance to be around some of this kit sends me a little giddy. I also want a view point that not many of people would have thought about and usually that means climbing into, getting on top of, or interacting with said piece of kit. In the examples to follow I popped the questions, how near can I get to that jet engine and can I get inside that wind tunnel?

I think those questions really pay off if you’ve got a compilant client and you stay away from the bits of equipment that: a) can hurt alot if touched and,  b) cost a fortune to replace.

Armed only with ear defenders and a creative perspective I shot the images below hand held and later post-processed in Lightroom.

I believe asking questions is key to understanding your subject matter better, the more you know the better your images will be and sometimes asking ridiculous questions can put you in some really interesting areas.

Click on the image below to see further examples from the shoot.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

The professional portrait photographers at Greg Harding Photography understand that time is money and work to minimise the disruption to your working day. That’s why we bring the studio to you. All the benefits of high quality, professional grade corporate portraiture, but cost effective and time efficient. Click here to view our gallery of professional portraits.

Our professional photographer will set up in a meeting room or even the corner of your office and then photograph your staff whenever they become available.

This is a no compromise solution to obtaining high quality images for:

• Marketing brochures
• News items
• Website updates
• Online business avatars such as LinkedIn.

Without exception every company is time-pressured these days and visiting an off-site professional portrait photographer can take a significant chunk of time out of the day.

Click here see more corporate head-shots and location specific portraits.

Get 10% off Our Professional Photography services

Fill out the contact form below and get 10% off your business headshot by quoting this reference: GHP-Nov11

Fundamentally, this is how I approach all my shots. For me the only way a picture works is if it tells the viewer about the story in the picture. Being a story teller is more important to a successful picture than the camera you’re using, the aperture you set your lens to, or the fancy lighting kit you’ve brought with you. If your images don’t hold the viewers attention, if it doesn’t illicite the desired response, or answers questions about the service, then maybe its time to re-think the purpose of the image.

When I first sit down with a client, one of the most important factors is: what does their business needs to say about itself? This is fundamental to its marketing success, eg. if its an education establishment looking to promote to parents, what grounds does it want to compete on? It may be to do with highlighting a relaxed learning environment, a new specialist learning resource or superb teacher/student relationships. But it must be something unique to them, something they need to shout about. For the construction sector, it may be that company ‘x’ wants to promote safe working to its investors and this would run as an undercurrent through the whole photo-shoot. Every setup we’d ask, does this image tell the clients story? and if it doesn’t we keep working till the scene fits the story perfectly.

Over the many years of being a professional story teller, I instinctively can feel when all the elements are coming together and those who have worked or assisted with me know I speak of ‘feeling the love’. When the composition, lighting, scene and story come together, it’s a pretty amazing feeling, a real buzz, a true moment to capture. Some shoots it’ll happen in a rush and they naturally feel right, but other shoots you have to work hard to craft the look and more importantly make it feel right in camera.

It takes experience to get a feel for this ‘in-camera’, but if I had to give you one tip for when you’re not ‘feeling the love’ it would be : step back and look hard at your composition. Most faults about story telling stem from incorrect composition or positioning, get that right and you’ll make your viewer feel the love with you.