Category Archives: Technique

Commentary, Equipment, Technique

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Two More Reasons to Love Live View

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Yesterday I was at Point Lobos shooting a variety of wildlife, nature, and landscape subject. As I worked I found myself using the live view feature of my Canon EOS 5D Mark II very frequently – partly for reasons I’ve written about before, but largely for two reasons that I’d like to briefly mention.

Much better depth of field preview – Everyone knows about the small depth of field preview button on the body near the lens. Since the lens is open to the widest aperture when you focus you cannot tell what your depth of field will be until you push this button to stop down to the aperture that you’ll use for your shot. There are two problems with this technique: you cannot judge sharpness critically enough across the frame in the viewfinder and the viewfinder becomes incredibly dim if you stop down to small apertures like f/16. Put those two problems together and the usefulness of the preview button is diminished. However, when you use live view the camera automatically adjusts when you press the preview button and the image is still plenty bright to see on the LCD. Even better, you can zoom in to 5x or 10x magnification to carefully check sharpness. All in all, this makes DOF preview a much more useful feature when live view is used.

You can compose a photograph when using neutral density filters to extend exposure – At one point this weekend I was using a 9-stop neutral density filter to make exposures of the surf with durations in the 10-20 second range. My usual practice is to compose the shot and, if necessary, manually focus without the filter attached. Once the shot is set up I attach the filter. Unfortunately, the filter renders the scene virtually invisible through the viewfinder. Recomposing or manually focusing requires removing the filter, making adjustments, and then reattaching the filter. I discovered yesterday that live view mode can display the image in the LCD even with my 9-stop ND filter in place, allowing me to make changes to the composition/framing or adjust focus without removing the filter

(Shortly after posting this I got a message from B&H photo saying that they again have the Canon EOS 5D Mark II back in stock, and unlike some other dealers they sell it with no markups at the list price of $2669.95.)

Equipment, Locations, Technique

Answering a Question: Lenses for Detail Photographs at Zabriskie Point

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Rajan emailed to say that he is heading to Death Valley soon to do some photography, including some at the Racetrack, and to ask a question about shooting at iconic Zabriskie Point:

“… if I wanted to get the details of the folds at Zabriskie point, would the 300mm f/4 work or would it be too close? If not, would the 70-200mm f/2.8 offer a better zoom out?”

I thought I’d share my response here so that others who might be interested can see the answer as well.

Zabriskie Points is, indeed, an icon. It has been photographed a few gazillion times. But if you are going to Death Valley for the first time, I would be the last person to tell you not to shoot there. Zabriskie Point is iconic for good reason, and being there between the pre-dawn first light and an hour or so after sunrise is an experience not to be missed – especially on a morning when sunrise light comes in beneath clouds and there is still snow on the summits of the Panamint Range across the Valley.

Even though I’ve photographed there a number of times, I still return. But my approach to this subject has changed, mainly in that I spend little or no time shooting the familiar Manley Beacon view. Instead, I like to use a long lens and watch carefully for interesting patterns, textures, and forms in the nearby eroded folds as the light continuously changes as the day begins. The half dozen or so photographs of the Zabriskie area from my most recent trip that please me the most focus on details of these formations. And this plays right into Rajan’s question.

I shoot a full frame DSLR, and almost all of the recent photographs were made with a 70-200mm zoom, most often shot at or near the longest focal length. For these sorts of shots I could have made use of a slightly longer lens – perhaps the 300mm prime or possibly my 100-400mm zoom. If I had a 200mm prime I could have done quite a bit of interesting work with that as well.

Gully, Morning Light, Zabriskie Point
Gully, Morning Light, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. April 3, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

With that in mind, if you shoot a cropped sensor camera and are thinking about photographs somewhat like mine (check my posts from the past couple of weeks for some examples) the 70-200mm zoom should work quite nicely. While the 300mm could be useful, if I were shooting a cropped sensor body I don’t think I would need it, given the smaller angle of view from these cameras at a given focal length.

I’ll offer a few other suggestions:

  • Arrive quite early. I usually arrive well before dawn when it is still rather dark. I want plenty of time to get myself into position and to get my gear set up and ready. If you get there when the light is good you will have already missed some great opportunities.
  • Don’t focus exclusively on the very impressive show in front of you, but also scan to your left and right and even behind you.
  • Plan your shooting relative to the progression of the light from the rising sun across the scene. The first dawn light will strike the peaks of the Panamints and then spread across most of the range. Then it starts to work its way across the Valley while the nearby formations remain in shadow. Next the light will begin to hit the nearby ridges to your right and then Manley Beacon. (In my view, the best light on Manley Beacon lasts a very short time, so if you plan to photograph it be ready. Eventually the light will begin to do its magic on the folded, curved eroded formations below Zabriskie – and this stage lasts the longest of all and, I think, provides the greatest variety of subjects.
  • During this last part of “the show”  I like to shoot the details of the folds with a longer lens. While you’ll naturally be focusing your attention in the direction of Death Valley, start paying a lot of attention to what is happening to your left – the tops of the curved ridges start to pick up some very wonderful light.
  • Don’t leave too soon. Long after many of the dawn photographers have left – no doubt heading back to Furnace Creek for a nice breakfast and coffee – interesting stuff continues to happen on the eroded folds and gullies. Brighter light reflects back into shaded gullies, better light penetrates down into the lower sections of the washes, tops of folds catch angling light, and so forth.

Good luck with your trip, Rajan!

Commentary, Technique

Some Thoughts on Black and White Conversion in Photoshop

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Every so often you run across an article that offers some unfortunate advice on an important subject – perhaps it offers outdated advice or suggests a less effective technique. I saw such an article today on methods for converting color digital images to black and white in Photoshop. Sometimes seeing such an article encourages me to write something about the same topic as a counterpoint – and that is what led to this post.

I cannot claim to be the master of this conversion process, and I recognize that there are several ways to do it that are both effective and different that what I’ll describe. In addition, this will be more or less an overview rather than a detailed tuturial. IN any case, I want to offer some ideas that might be a bit more contemporary, flexible, and powerful than those I read about in that article. Continue reading Some Thoughts on Black and White Conversion in Photoshop →

Equipment, Technique

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Live View and Night Photography

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I have shot a few thousand frames with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II now. I’ve photographed a variety of subjects including a few days of rainy professional bicycle stage racing, several landscape subjects, and a productive evening of night photography with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I plan to eventually write up something resembling a comprehensive report on my experience, but so far there hasn’t been time. With that in mind, here is a short piece on one new feature in this camera and my experience with it.

Among the photographic subjects that interest me is night photography, often of urban and industrial subjects, but occasionally of wild landscapes also. There are a number challenges to shooting in very dark conditions, but one of the more interesting is getting good focus in conditions where auto-focus often can’t find a target to work with and where it is too dark to manually focus. (I wrote a bit about this in a recent piece: “Hints for Night Photography.”)

During my last Mare Island shoot I discovered that Live View provides a very useful option for focusing at night. On the 5D II, the Live View mode raises the mirror and lets you look at a “live view” of your scene on the rear LCD. In very dim light the trick is to find something that might provide a manual focus target, center the rectangular LCD indicator over that “something,” zoom in to 10x magnification on this object, and then focus manually on the LCD image. I was amazed at the low light levels at which this works quite well. A vertical line in a wall, the edge of a window, a bit of cyclone fence, or a small light – any of these become decent manual focus targets using Live View.

When I started my Mare Island evening shoot, using this camera for the first time at night, I mostly did things the old fashioned way. By the end of the evening, in any very dim situation I was successfully and much more quickly getting good focus using Live View. I’m confident that night photographers are going to find that this is a very powerful and useful feature.