I spent the last couple weeks of April in Taiwan, traveling around the island and snapping somewhere around 600 pictures during this vacation. It was great to get away from Vancouver and just snap fun pictures. The weather was quite unstable while I was in Taiwan which meant a lot of cool cloud formations. Here are some pictures that I managed to process so far.
Posted in landscape
This is pretty cool to watch
Cowboy and Aliens – Behind the Scene with Timothy White
Couldn’t embed the video in the blogpost so you’d have to hop over to vimeo to watch this awesome video.
Posted in lighting, photo shoot, video
Lately I’m seeing more and more reviews/comparisons/discussions between Canon 5DIII and Nikon D800. My conclusion, after reading a few reviews, is that both cameras are excellent. Both will take great pictures and provide improvement over their predecessors. The 5DIII beats the D800 at some things, and the D800 beats the 5DIII at some things. You simply can’t go wrong with either camera. What I find extremely annoying is that some Canon or Nikon fanboys would simply defend their respective brands to no tomorrow. Last time I checked, photography is an art and camera body is simply a tool. Yes having an expensive camera body and an expensive lens may give you a higher probability of taking a good picture but you don’t need the best of the best to produce a good picture.
Just a random rant.
Posted in random
Weather in Vancouver has been getting better lately which allowed me to try a different panorama technique few days ago. Usually when it comes to panorama I would stitch series of pictures together first then process the panorama picture afterward. This time I decided to do the other way around.
For this particular shot, I walked around False Creek seawall just before sunset, found a good spot, and snapped a series of 16 pictures for this panorama shot below using the Canon 35L.
Once I got home I loaded the pictures into Lightroom and applied the landscape preset that I created on the 1st picture in the series. I took a quick look at the 1st picture and found it turned out very well. I was satisfied so I selected all 16 pictures and hit “sync.” The same preset was applied for all 16 pictures. Once this was done I output the pictures and stitched them using AutoPano Pro. If your’e into panorama and you don’t have AutoPano Pro I’d highly recommend you getting it. It’s an awesome program.
A few minor adjustments in AutoPano Pro later I ended up with the picture above. Simple & easy. 
Posted in landscape
David Hobby at Strobist pointed out a couple of nice DYI mods that you might want to give it a try.
First is the Home Depot homebrew Profoto globe. The Profoto (some might misspell it as Prophoto hehe) globe is a pretty neat light modifier that makes your strobe a 360 degree light source. If you have watched Joey Lawrence’s latest DVD you’ll notice that he used this light modifier at one of his location shoots. This particular light modifier gives a very interesting light and it’s super cool to use. This mod is quite neat since it only costs about $10.
The second mod is to improve your Pocket Wizard performance. Not only you’ll see an improve radio performance it also makes it easier to mount your radio trigger. This is a brilliant idea!
I came across the following video today (yes I’ve been a bit behind on my RSS feeds via Google Reader) and thought it was an amazing video. The video was from this year’s Gulf Photo Plus shootout featuring David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Gregory Heisler. Each photographer had 20 minutes to come up with a self portrait. It was definitely interesting to see the reaction of all three photographers when they were told what they were shooting for. Just like them, I’m not keen to step in front of the camera. I prefer behind the camera.
Heisler’s picture from the shootout really caught my attention. Just as someone would expect from a MASTER photographer, Heisler thought about the picture for 5 minutes and didn’t take his first frame until 18 minutes into the shootout. What’s even more amazing is the fact that he only needed 1 frame to create the image.
It was also pretty neat to see Martin Prihoda in the video, whom I had the pleasure to meet last year in Vancouver. He’s one amazing photographer and really cool dude! Hopefully one of these days I’ll able to take his Big Light Far Away workshop.
Posted in video
I haven’t shot portraits as much lately due to various reasons. One of the reasons is that I’ve been working on a side project with my wife. The project is called Three More Bites which is a website that focuses on gourmet home-made food with recipes. Both of us love to cook and create new recipes so we thought it would be a great idea to start a website sharing our love for food. Since I’m the photographer in the family, I end up taking a lot of pictures of the dishes we create. On the surface food photography is very different from portrait photography – your subject doesn’t move or talk as real live models do. But when you look a little deeper, food photography is really no different than portrait photography. Both areas require the photographers knowledge about the light and how to bring out the best of the subject. The biggest challenge I find with food photography so far is finding the optimal depth of field (DoF). I want to present the food with a decent amount of DoF to entice the viewer but not too much DoF so the background becomes a distraction.
Since I started shooting food photography for Three More Bites I find myself flipping through an increasing number of cookbooks, to get ideas of how to shoot food items. Here are some shots that I’ve done recently.
If you have time please check out Three More Bites. I hope to see you there.
Zack Arias posted All the pictures were taken with Fujifilm X-Pro 1 camera. The picture quality is quite impressive, certainly helps when you have an impressive photographer like Zack taking pictures. Traveling with a DSLR can be challenging due to size and weight. Sometimes you end up drawing too much attention from unwanted crowd. A small camera like X-Pro 1 is certainly on my wish list if I spend lots time traveling and shoot a lot of travel photography. This is one of the reasons why micro 4/3 are getting more and more popular these days.
Posted in random
I was going through some old pictures today and here are a few old pictures that jumped out to me. I’m not sure why I’m even posting these since they show how little I knew about photography back then. Perhaps once in a while it’s important to look back at your photography path and reflect what you’ve done.
Posted in random
Over the past year, There has been a lot of rumors and speculations on the Canon 5DIII. Lucky for us Canon users, this week Canon finally announced the highly anticipated 5DIII!
In case you haven’t heard about the announcement (do you live in a cave or something? :p) here’s a quick run down of the 5DIII specs:
You can get this brand spanking new camera for $3500 US.
I was quite excited to see all the specs. Canon hit everything on my wish list. Mind you, I only had 2 items on my list so it wasn’t exactly hard to satisfy me. I was quite pleased to see that Canon has decided to stick with 22 MP, same as the 5DII. The ISO performance appears to be about 2 stops better than the 5DII. This is pretty impressive considering 5DII is already pretty clean to begin with.
After the announcement, the overwhelming question I’ve been hearing is…. Does it make sense to upgrade my existing camera to 5DIII?
Let’s look at the specs listed above one by one…
For my style of shooting, portraiture, I rarely shoot at high ISO. Usually, the highest I shoot is 1600 ISO which means I’m covering some sort of events in poor lit condition. In this case I usually would have a flash with me and I’m more than comfortable using the flash and bouncing light off the wall or ceiling. 6 fps is pretty useless for portraiture. If you shoot that fast chances are you’ll fry your strobe/flash first. Second, I rarely shoot sports so the 6 fps is not much of a use for me. I don’t shoot video so while the dual memory slots and video capability look great, I doubt I’ll utilize them. The 3.2″ LCD is pretty nice but if you’re shooting at the level that you can justify buying a full-frame camera, you shouldn’t be chimping! Sure the occasional look at the LCD is useful but you shouldn’t be using your LCD to judge if that was a good picture or not. Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a film camera and practice. Or just tape over the LCD for a month so you can learn how to expose properly. The in-camera HDR is nice, if you’re lazy like Homer Simpson! Why let your camera do HDR when you can most likely do a better job in post? Do you really think that the Canon engineers know exactly what you want to see in an HDR picture?
After a long look at the specs, the only really useful thing to me is the improved AF system. Don’t get me wrong I think Canon really hit the ball out of the park with the 5DIII announce. However the price is way too high! To me, at $3500 for the camera body, I’m basically paying Canon the extra $1500 for a new 61-points AF system. If I was considering getting the newly announced 24-70 II, I’d be looking at spending over $5500 just on the camera body and one single lens! I know, we can just charge clients 20% more to cover my cost. Now try to explain that one to your clients and see if they’ll go for that. Let me know if you have any success. 
For me, I won’t be getting the 5DIII anytime soon. I’d rather spend the money on a better lighting system. After all, photography is all about capturing light! What’s your opinion? I’d love hearing yours too!
Posted in Uncategorized
