Camera Kit – Selkie’s Photography

Camera Bags: My name is Selkie, and I have a problem.

I do. There are some folks out there who have more than I own but I still think four might be a couple too many. There’s the first bag that was cheap and a security risk; and eventually the kit outgrew it. There’s the second bag, also known as the it-came-with-a-magazine-subscription bag. There’s the shoulder bag because I was carrying too much, now doing double duty carrying my lunch to work. Then there’s the behemoth. A Vanguard VEO T48 backpack in blue.

Ah but that doesn’t look so bad, you say. Oh, you don’t realise that this has far more in common with Doctor Who’s TARDIS than the colour. I packed and took it out for the day; wondered why by the end I could barely move… It weighed 17 pounds. That’s like having a year and a half old toddler strapped onto your back. I took it on to the scales in the bathroom to satisfy the curiosity of my friend, who thought she would need to dust off her CPR skills on me during the walk. So I’ll be honest, it’s big and cavernous, and I can’t imagine ever having enough kit to have it completely stuffed. I also can’t imagine being able to carry it when loaded either.

Optimism, thy name is Jet2 ground crew. It does pass itself off as hand luggage most of the time but good luck wedging it under a seat. There’s a lot to love about this bag. I won’t grow out of it. Mostly because I woundn’t be able to carry anthing bigger. It has a water bottle holder (that you can take off for travel by air) and attachments for tripod. You can move them around too. Tripod on the side? Done. Want to move it to the back (or front? What do you call the big flat outside edge?)? Yep, you can do that. I know that is the main point of tactical bags. The military want to make them as adaptable as possible and it easily spills into areas where people carry a very different collection of kits. I mean every photographer carries a totally different kit, search YouTube for kit videos if you don’t believe me. The bag’s internals do all sorts of magical things and it seems twice as deep as any other bag I’ve gone through. There’s a Joby Gorillapod 3K in there and I’ve not seen it for weeks now.

For all I talked about the weight I could put into it, there was no strain on my back. There’s a waist belt…THAT HAS POCKETS! Finally somewhere for the lens cap/car keys/face mask/change. One thing per pocket though; there’s not enough room for all of that at the same time. There’s a chest strap to secure and balance the shoulder straps, another large backpack standard. As someone with boobs there’s always some scepticism about these; the chest strap is removable and adjustable because they don’t always work with the anatomy.

I don’t have a front view (of me) so you don’t get to appreciate the space-time distortion that the chest strap creates. So maybe it’s time to have a look at those storm clouds on the horizon. Unlike it’s smaller stablemates, the 45T and 37T, there’s no top access and you can only go in one side, no matter how you set up in the innards. The top upside down zipper only leads to a little flat pocket good for spare memory cards and batteries, and the side I choose for my water bottle also leads to another little pocket that I relocated the waterproof cover to. They are slighly useless pockets, I’ll admit, but I’ve still managed to fill them with stuff. Although, this might not be the weak link in its design. Remember I mentioned my first bag had a security issue? It was a front access bag. One massive zip running the whole way round the front of the bag. Bye bye camera…? Soon as I noticed that it became a twitchy eye moment when I was out in public with it. Forever wondering if it was going to get stolen. Access through the back is the way forward my friends. With a bag this size you an undoubtedly carrying a vast amount of kit that will have cost you a fair amount of your hard earned money. You don’t want someone to just walk of with it because they could get an easy access zip open, and if they try to run off with the whole thing then I doubt they will get far before collapsing and needing CPR.

Where does this leave us? Lost? Confused? Having friends worry about my health? Endlessly searching for the perfect home for my camera and lenses? Probably. It’s a good bag. I’ve taken it on flights, hikes, boats and busses; and it’s as good looking as the day I lifted it out its delivery box. A box so big I could have posted myself out in. I love it really, even if I was slightly disappointed by the lack of top opening but I’ll survive. Right, I’m off to lift some weights so I can get it off the floor in time for next week’s shoot.

HNC Photography

It’s all over. Officially. The certificate arrived in the post (much like the Higher one, although this one actually made it to the right address this year) and my former class mates are off onto the HND. I’ll do mine next year once I’ve worked a bit and paid off a few bills.

So I thought I’d do a bit of a collection of the different work I’ve accumulated over the year of work. So the year started with the still life unit, so there was some studio work but we went outside with lego for It’s a Small World. Then I took it further as the unit ended with the tiny model railway people re-enacting Hands, Face, Space. Some of the other work from the Still Life unit appeared in my more general Autumn post.
New year, new lockdown and we did most of Portraiture in our own homes and I ran a little short on models. The final term was Documentary photography and my final project was Unsafe Spaces. In which I discovered that Photoshop could really use a spell checker function. The Applied Photography unit showed that there was more than just taking photos… The infrared or ultra violet were pretty different although quite easy to do on a basic scale. A more practical application of the infrared was the trail camera. Watching Indy at night wasn’t exactly riveting but it was something I wanted to try for a long time. Finally there was an accumulation of work in an over haul of the Portfolio and the way this site looks.

So it’s just a matter of wait and earn… and hope they let me back in next year…..

Off The Visual Spectrum

Cast your mind back to school, science class to be exact, because we’re going to be looking at the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Don’t want to go there? It’s ok ‘cos I’m explaining it anyway.
The spectrum is all of the different types of sources of electromagnetic radiation stacked together by wavelength and frequency.

So it contains gamma radiation, x rays, microwave and radio. Wedged in there is the visible light, the stuff we normally choose point cameras at. While we are still in our mental classroom remember that old phrase they used to trot out? Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain? It’s the order of the colours in the visible light spectrum with violet hanging out at one end and red at the other, this is where we’re headed off to with this experiment.

Infrared photography is really popular at the moment. There’s plenty of strange white trees and dark skies on Instagram. There’s over 200,000 uses of the hashtag #infraredphotography on Insta, it’s a feed full of the most amazing images. Of course, this technique also how some cameras work in the dark, like the trail camera I was playing with only last week. That’s a super useful feature on security and CCTV systems.
There’s a few different ways of getting in on the infrared art trend. You can get an older DSLR camera altered to remove the inbuilt infrared filtering system (you can do it yourself if you are brave/stupid). There’s infrared film, if you are into that. You can get yourself an infrared filter and try it that way on your camera. Or there’s a shortcut if you get a filter and a camera phone.

You just hold the filter over the lens on the phone and take a photo on a bright day. It’s going to come out all red but a little in phone edit to convert the image to black and white at it’s done. That’s how the 2 images above with trees were created. The one of the buildings and the city street? That was the same filter on my DSLR but it’s just not as impressive in an urban environment.

So at the other end of the spectrum, literally in this case, is ultraviolet. You can get yourself a converted camera to shoot in UV, it’s the same as the infrared conversion but it becomes “full spectrum”. There’s some other kit you might need to pick up as well. This is probably a route folk would go down if you are serious or in dermatology. It shows up skin damage as UV light is what is responsible for your fine sun tan, or your daft sun burn, or your very worrying skin cancer. Fun fact – if you put on sun block and take a shot of your face it would look like you had put paint on it because it’s blocking the UV.
Still we can have some fun with this without a load of kit and expense.

I worked in the USA at a summer camp back in 2009 and this is in an expired passport…. Would you allow this woman to look after your child?

So if you get yourself a black light (yup, just like in the clubs or on CSI – I’m showing my age here) then you can make the most amazing things show up. Just block out most of the light so they become really bright. In other words, shoot in the dark. So money, driving licences, passports, etc all have security protection using different methods. One is to have a printed layer that would normally be invisible to the naked eye over it. When the document is checked with a black light there’s a chance that a fraudster would not have gone to the bother of creating this design as well. This one surprised me as I assumed it would not be in the same chance of being copied as a passport itself. The passport it is in was before the biometric era and was rather boring under UV light. The biometric passport I have now is fascinating, there’s a different animal on every page. Those images are taking a little longer to edit as I don’t want to share my passport number or any details on the internet for all to see.
When you get bored of looking at all the bank notes you can find… there’s the world of UV makeup that makes for fab fashion images (if you find someone more skilled at applying makeup than me, obviously).

So did you survive your trip back to science class? Was it worth it? It’s completely worth giving it a try. I’ll probably be giving infrared a few more goes.

Trail Camera

spypoint

So I’ve made jokes about my lack of skills in the wildlife photography department… Very occasionally I get a little luck, like ol’ Jazz Hands here. But as part of my HNC I got to play with a proper trail camera, like someone who really tracks down animals and not just hopes that a heron will stick their landing in front of me.

It was actually a lot of fun to play with (and I’ll be honest here it was playing). I don’t have any real animal tracking skills and I don’t own the trail camera, so decided to put it where it wouldn’t be stolen and where I know there’s an animal to capture…. So it was placed in Indy’s stable to capture her movement overnight and it worked.

Here she is! I never catch her sleeping so this is really a bit of a treat.

So here’s some hard facts – it’s a Spypoint Force Dark Trail Camera and if you want to buy one Wex is charging £149 (at time of me writing anyway). This model can take photos, video and time lapse both in the dark, using infrared, and in colour. It has a 12 megapixel sensor and is “weather proof” (so I wouldn’t dunk it in the river). It takes a whopping 8 (eight) AA batteries (unless you can put your hands on a rechargeable battery unit for it but that will set you back about £65). However, it does have decent battery life for those 8 AAs. I used some bargain Kodak labled ones and got 4 full 18 hour stints out of them and they were only at 50%. In each of those nights there were about 650 images. This seems OK by my standards and matches what is stated on the websites for it surviving 7 days out in the wild.

I suppose that this isn’t the mose exciting use but I don’t know of any badger setts to stalk. I do know where some deer usually pass through for food but didn’t have long enough to trial that one out as an idea. Maybe next time.

Back To Work

So I’ve returned to what passes for normal life and obviously there’s work to go to and things to do.

I mean how cool are these viewpoint signs in Tenerife? Medium format cameras make excellent silhouettes.

It’s also back to college and back to taking shots for class. Probably this time I’ll be carrying my camera on my commute and trying for some urban architecture and skylines. If I survive the commute since it’s up hill to the office through the city centre. Oddly enough it is also time to be looking at applying to college if I can get funding for HND photography. The hardest part is putting a portfolio together for it, I’m going to have to go digging through the archives to find a range of shots to put in it.

On the blog front, I have acquired a couple of odd photography accessories recently, partly thanks to the prize for the Capture Christmas competition. So I will probably do a couple of posts to talk about them. I’m not sponsored, so these are not in anyway paid for or supported by the manufacturer at this point, except where I earn money and pay it to companies for their products like everyone else. These are just my experiences from using them in my hobby/work. If later on I get any freebies I’ll be the first to let you know. But if it doesn’t work then I’m not going to be positive, that I can make a promise of. As my mother would point out just now – what would the point of lying be?

Capture Christmas Competition

Before Christmas Wex, that purveyor of fine camera equipment, taker of wages, and destroyer of credit cards, ran a competition. There were 3 categories; food, family, and festivities. Here’s all the winning photos.

Well I sent this in as an entry in the food category and it, somehow, magically, came first. I know I’m still slightly speechless. This is actually the first time a photo of mine has won anything. It was a slightly ridiculous set up in my bedroom to capture these tiny model railway road workers. What made me laugh was the number of models that were not actually doing any work. The dude with the clipboard is clearly the foreman though.

What it looked like from behind the camera

So with my camera on the tripod, which was more of an after thought actually. I spent 2 packs of chocolate coins getting the stacks right. They were meant to be for my nephews but I did replace them. These tiny model people don’t stand so well by themselves so they are often stuck to the ground with glue dots or parts of them.

As for camera settings, with a tripod you can get away with massively long shutter speeds. So ISO 100 and a tiny aperture to get a depth of field. I might have gotten slightly better results with a macro lens but the 24-105mm f4 lens does have a macro setting. Next time I’ll try focus stacking with Affinity photo. So there’s sharpness from the front all the way to the back. I settled the focus point on the face of the work foreman, in case you are wondering. No post processing either. It came out just the way I wanted it, with a bit of practice.

I did another set up but it wasn’t as effective. Although the guys are standing around not working very hard here.

Edinburgh Night Street Photography

So last night I took part in an event run by Wex (where most of my wages go) to learn nighttime street photography from Edo Zollo. His work on the streets of London at night are great and figured it would be fun.

It was mostly about getting the lighting and camera settings right. If I can get past putting heads dead centre of shots then I might have a chance. It was quite different to what I usually get up to and I think I have really learned something.

The 77D

So I’ve had the new camera body for about a month now. There’s loads of internet pages out there that will give you the breakdown of the differences between the older 1300 and the newer 77, so I won’t bore you with them. I was after a camera that would work with the lenses I have but would respond better in low light and focus with less stress when I’m not the sharpest. It’s does have the same crop sensor which helps all the lenses get on. Although I’m still mostly using my old 1300’s kit lens mostly. I’m saving to replace it but that won’t be soon.

The touchscreen that pivots is great so I don’t have to twist my neck in museums when I’m after a ghost people shots. Although I’ve started not using it so much when I’m able to use the viewfinder and the lcd screen on the top which covers the settings in manual mode.

It has proven itself so far with the shots from Rainbow Run to prove it.

Brig O’Doon

So I went to the Wex Glasgow open day yesterday and came home with a lonely, ignored, locked in a dark cupboard camera….. Yes, ok…. I bought a Canon EOS 77D. I feel slightly better about flat lining my credit card for it if I believe I rescued it. Although the 1300D is still a great camera, I wanted something faster and better in low light and it’s time for a new challenge. So today I took it out for a spin at Robert Burn’s birthplace.

Don’t drop your camera!

Could also be titled “what those ‘useless’ UV filters are for”. A cautionary tale for other photographers.