WHAT A TANGLED WEB. (10/09/13

What could be easier than taking a picture of a sky for a theatrical back drop…….Almost everything!… In my short experience of photography.

I’m down in Sherriff Hutton just outside York. I’m here to get wrecked with an old friend and take pictures of some beautiful old cars and a posh shit house and shower block. Both require multiple strobes and a very posh lens. I had three strobes all connected through Pocket Wizard to the camera, the test shots last night were a disappointment, that's a posh word for crap. I’m there with the best wide angle lens yet built for under £2k. I can tilt. I can shift, I can focus cos I have it tethered to the computer.  But computer she say no, I’m boss. I say yes. Computer she was right. One strobe wasn’t firing. That is my fault. I have two diffusers but no soft box so draped a tea towel over the third strobe. I removed the cloth and it fired perfect. Canon is cunning they can detect a pot wiper from fifty quids worth of diffuser. They won’t trick me though. I hung the same rag from a stick on two clothes pegs and it couldn’t tell. I’m not daft. Another free week on the piss. Even idiots deserve a break now and again.

Does anyone know how to scale a sky down. I have tried starting really big and then getting closeish with a 50mm lens, I’ve tried with Telephoto from 135mm to 800mm. I’ve tried building up to eighteen frame panoramas and scaling them. Nothing works. So I tried projecting them on the inside of a quadrant of a cylinder. That was Interesting. I tried projecting them onto the inside of a sphere or hemisphere if one is a pedant. All and one look worse than this.

Which is this bit of this. I used to use Genuine Fractuals to upscale. I think the Adobe Bicubic smoother does a good job on a sky. I have this at a metre wide. And it looks fine and in scale. I  have found two wee bits of crap on the sensor. Years since I bothered looking. Olympus were good at mucking out, brilliant at building camera bodies and Zuiko lenses. They just didn’t keep pace with full frame or even two thirds and the software.

If this doesn’t work I can take eight frames of this view with a 400mm lens and merge them. That will be some file size but since I’ve got the new laptop it copes well with Baking, Rendering and Saving…even uncompressed Png file extensions. What is Png…Don’t ask me but many of the graphics folk…..

(They usually grow a little beard on their chin and have a big silver lined hole in one ear lobe. They tend to wear mascara and in some extreme cases eye liner. I’m not being sexist both sexes of the Arty Farty folk look much the same….Like some types of butterfly. I have to have a sniff to tell them male from female.) I’ve stopped doing the sniffing. When I find out I find out I’m too old.

They require Short compression Png extension files. It takes twice as long as normal Png. Why does short mean bigger. That is artists for you. Next time I find a nubile artist I’ll let her know mine is a short Png file extension.

In future I will supply uncompressed Tiff. Well I am willing to if I can sort Drop Box. Otherwise I’ll just post a memory stick. Sticks are nothing like a stick, the new ones are as big as my thumb nail. Hold 8GB so are more cost effective than Drop Box. I’m biased, I’m a bit thick and couldn’t make Dropsy Boxy work.

I’m halfway to getting on the way through yet another week.

Have fun.