Camera Support Systems

If you’ve read my previous posts about tripods, then you understand that high quality tripods are sold “bare”, without anything to attach them to your camera. This is where the ballhead and quick-release clamp come in. Good quality ballheads are designed to support heavy loads, move smoothly but lock solidly. Ballheads are easier to use and much more stable than the old fashioned “pan & tilt” tripod heads. Aiming and leveling can be accomplished as one motion, and solid lockup is accomplished with a tightening of only one control. The best designed ballheads also offer variable tension that makes them easy to control. Tripods with ballheads are much easier to pack and carry than pan & tilt heads since they have no long handles to get in the way.

But the ballhead is only half the story. The other half is the clamp system which is used to attach your camera to the ballhead. Mounting your camera using the standard ¼”‑20 screw is far too slow and insecure. Instead, many manufacturers adopted the “Arca-Swiss” standard which uses an open-ended dovetail channel with compressing side jaws that grip the mounting plate or bracket attached to the camera. This unique setup provides a quick and easy clamping system that is very solid and secure.

When used in conjunction with an L-Plate designed for your specific camera the quick-release clamp system allows the landscape photographer to quickly switch between shooting horizontally and vertically as shown in the images below.

Really Right Stuff
In my opinion the best designed and highest quality ballheads, clamps and camera plates are made by Really Right Stuff, a great little company in California owned and operated by Joe Johnson. The folks at RRS are incredible to work with and their attention to detail in the design and manufacturing of camera support systems is second to none. That’s why you’ll see nine out of ten professionals using RRS gear including guys like Joe McNally, Moose Peterson and Scott Kelby.

The advice I give to any serious amateur is to buy the best tripod and ballhead you can possibly afford and buy them only once.  Really Right Stuff (gotta love that name) gear is expensive folks but worth every single penny. The workmanship is something I’ve only seen in medical devices before and the various parts fit together perfectly, time after time.

I’ve put an RRS L-Plate on every camera I currently shoot with from my 5D mark III to my G10 and can lock them into my BH-40 LR / Gitzo Traveller in just seconds to capture that perfect light at the end of the day. I honestly can’t imagine using any other brand than Really Right Stuff.

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Using Alien Skin Bokeh with Your Canon G10/G11/G12

You never know when a great photographic opportunity will present itself but sometimes lugging around a DSLR and lens is just not possible. That’s why most of us carry a point & shoot camera like the Canon Powershot G10/G11/G12 wherever we go.  Like many photographers, I really love the resolution and detail my Canon 5D Mark II is capable of producing and for most of my professional and personal shooting it’s my camera of choice. However, like all other DSLRs the 5D2 can be quite a load to lug around when you’re already carrying too much other stuff.

This past Sunday I participated in my first Cowboy Action Shooting (SASS) match with the Thunder River Renegades in Magnolia, Texas. I’d thought to bring along my complete camera bag but after loading my rifle, shotgun, pistols, ammunition, costume and gun cart, I thought better of it and grabbed my trusty G10 instead.

Sometimes all you really need is the convenience of a point & shoot combined with the control of a DSLR (without the weight of course). This is the niche that Canon’s Powershot “G” series were made for. And with the addition of a few inexpensive accessories as shown above, the G10/G11/G12 can perform perfectly on those occasions when less is more. In fact, I find myself taking my G10 with me everywhere I go these days, just in case I stumble upon a scene like this!

Original Image Before Post-Capture Processing

Depth of Field and Image Clutter
One of the drawbacks to using a point & shoot style camera like the G10 for this type of action shot is the very wide depth of field. Yes, the same feature that makes a point & shoot cameras so great for landscape works makes them fairly poor for portrait work. The problem is image clutter. When almost everything in the frame is in perfect focus your main subject tends to become lost in the clutter. That’s why most portrait photographers shoot with very large apertures to attain that perfect blurred background or bokeh.

Luckily, there is a great little Photoshop plug-in from Alien Skin called “Bokeh 2” that helps eliminate this background “clutter” during post-capture processing. It works nearly as well on images from my G10 as it does on those from my 5D2.

My first step in creating this image was to process it as I would normally do in Lightroom. I generally work on the Basic settings like Exposure, Recovery (very important), Blacks (also very important), Brightness and overall Contrast. I almost always crank up the Clarity (adding mid-tone contrast) and Vibrance (adding mid-tone saturation) and may play with these two settings for 20 or 30 minutes until I find a combination I like.

At this point, my work in Lightroom 3 is complete and my next step is to export the image into Photoshop CS5 and use the Quick Selection tool to select the shooter and timer as shown here. Although the selection doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, it always pays in realism to spend a little extra time making a thorough selection of all parts of the subject.

Quick Selections in for Photoshop CS5

Once you’ve got a basic selection done it’s time to use the Refine Edge tool to Smooth, Feather and Expand the selection you’ve just made. For the most realistic look I want to make sure all the subjects that should be in perfect focus are included in the selection and that the selection “feathers” into the background naturally. Once that’s done your new selection should look something like this.

Refine Selections in for Photoshop CS5

You’ll understand why this step is vital when you begin to play around with the settings in the Alien Skin Bokeh plug-in filter. Bokeh provides creative controls to enhance images by focusing the viewer’s attention anywhere you want. In the image above, the Bokeh plug-in was used to enhance the background blur. Blurring the background in an image like this one makes the subject “pop” and seem that much sharper.

Alien Skin Bokeh 2 Plug-in for Photoshop CS5

The final step in Photoshop CS5 is to blend the two layers you’ve just created using Lightroom (background layer) and Alien Skin Bokeh (bokeh layer). Now you could do this simply by flattening the layers but I suggest you take a little time and experiment with the Opacity of each layer until you achieve the desired results. I tend to blend the Bokeh layer at 65% – 75% to achieve the most realistic look to my image. Once you’ve completed this process, you just save the image in Photoshop and it should automatically show up in Lightroom, ready to be exported or printed, just like these three images below.

That’s Some Rifle Ma’am – Magnolia, Texas
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/4.5 for 1/60th of a second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 using Alien Skin’s Bokeh plug-in.

Old Time Shooting – Magnolia, Texas
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/4.5 for 1/60th of a second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 using Alien Skin’s Bokeh plug-in.

Girls & Guns – Magnolia, Texas
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/4.5 for 1/60th of a second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3.

Checkout my new Cowboy Action Shooting blog for more images just like these!

Iron Chef Canon Style

I get a lot of email these days from folks asking for advice on which new camera to buy. Many readers seem confused by all the marketing “hype” surrounding a camera’s sensor size (full frame vs. APS-C), resolution (15 MP vs. 18 MP vs. 21 MP) and image quality.

These questions got me thinking about some of the popular misconceptions folks have about digital photography so I decided to write up a short post that illustrates a simple but important point; “it ain’t the camera folks“.

Take these two landscape images for example. Both were taken only minutes apart under the same lighting conditions from the same tripod location. I intentionally chose to process them in Adobe Lightroom using the same basic “settings” so you could compare the results and see for yourself the difference between a $300 camera and a $2500 camera.

Lower McKinney Falls – Austin, Texas
Copyright © 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography

Lower McKinney Falls – Austin, Texas
Copyright © 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography

Iron Chef Time
Click on each image to see a higher resolution version. Pixel peep to your heart’s content (but don’t look at the metadata) and let me know if you can tell which image was taken by a PowerShot G10 and which was taken by an EOS 5D Mark II.

• Can’t tell the difference?

• Not sure which you like better?

The Bottom Line
Any DSLR or point & shoot camera made in the past five years can create stunning images like these two above. It’s not the camera, the lens, the filters or tripod that creates a beautiful image folks, it’s YOU. Here’s the best advice I can offer for those of you looking improve your photography by purchasing a new camera: DON’T DO IT.

Sunset on the Pedernales River

Here’s a shot taken on the final evening of the Texas Landscape Safari last April. We had hoped for a bit more drama but any night spent photographing Pedernales Falls is a treat for the senses.

Sunset on the Pedernales River – Johnson City, Texas
Copyright © 2010 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/5 for 1/125th of a second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3. Click on the image above for a larger version.
Click on the image above for a larger version.

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The Spring 2011 Texas Landscape Safari Recap

What a great group of photographers to teach, travel and shoot with!

Here are a few statistics to recap this year’s outing. 17 people each traveled over 300 miles in 3 days to photograph four different and unique state parks working on average 12 hours each day to capture literally thousands of great landscape shots.

Josh’s Enchanted Rock Classroom – Llano, Texas
Copyright © 2010 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/4 for 1/250th of a second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3.
Click on the image above for a larger version.

Oh, we got scattered a few times but all ended up enjoying some great Texas weather during our three day safari with lots of sunshine, a few clouds but no rain in sight. Gorman creek was running over the falls near Bend, Tx. The mighty Colorado was low but still running as were both the Pedernales and Guadalupe rivers. The heights of Enchanted Rock haven’t gotten any easier to climb but the sunset and clear skies made the trek worth while. As always, the rocks and water in each park called to us like bees to honey. We climbed, explored, laughed and did it all again the next day. And as is usually the case, we made made new friends from as far away as Canada and California as well as those that live closer to home.

It was my honor and a great pleasure to host this year’s Texas Landscape Safari and to get to know each and every one of you a little better. You all have a gift for capturing light and turning it into art and I learned as much as I taught. Keep in touch and remember that TLS alumni are always welcome to join us again in the future for FREE, even those that brought their iPhones. 🙂

Jeff

Outfitting Your Canon G Series for Landscape Photography

I love the resolution and detail the Canon 5D Mark II is capable of producing and for most of my commercial and landscape work it’s my camera of choice. However, like all other DSLRs the 5D2 can seem like quite a load to lug around during a serious day-hike or weekend backpack trip to the mountains of west Texas but I hesitate to leave it behind on the off chance that I’ll stumble upon a once in a lifetime photographic opportunity and won’t have by best gear along to capture it.

With the Canon Powershot “G” series cameras and a few simple accessories, this fear can finally be put to bed. The resolution, sharpness and lack of barrel or pin-cushion distortion offered by the G10/G11/G12 cameras make them ideal for landscape work.

The first accessory on my list was adding a circular polarizer to the G10 to help reduce glare and add some saturation to his images. Luckily, the folks at Lensmate in Seattle make a line of precision machined aluminum lens adapters for the Canon G10/G11/G12 that allow you to add a polarizing filter to the camera without creating a vignetting problem. Lensmate also sells the 72mm low profile Kenko Pro1 Digital CP filter that their adapters are designed to work with.

$ 24.95 — Lensmate G10 / G11 Adapter (Part A)
$ 22.95 — Lensmate G10 / G11 Adapter (Part B)
$ 74.95 — Kenko Pro1 Circular Polarizer (low profile 72mm)

Canon Powershot G10 with Lensmate Adapters & CP Filter

The next accessory I recommended was a light-weight tripod and ball-head like the Gitzo GT-1541T Traveller and the Really Right Stuff BH-30LR. I explained that there’s nothing more important to landscape photographer than the camera support system. Once he got over the sticker shock I also recommended picking up the RRS BG-10L L-Plate designed specifically to mount the G10 in a RRS quick-release clamp as shown below.

$88.00 — Really Right Stuff BG10-L: L-Plate for Canon G10

Canon Powershot G10 with Really Right Stuff L-Plate

Finally, I recommended he buy a hand-strap like the Camdapter Camstrap from Jim Garavuso. Jim is an engineer and avid photographer with keen eye for good design. I’ve used his high quality leather hand-straps on all my cameras.

The custom hand-strap seen in the image above I created by modifying the neck strap that comes with the G10 and mounting it under the RRS L-Plate. Not the best solution but it works in a pinch.

$30.00  —  Camdapter Camstrap

As you can see, with a few basic accessories the Canon Powershot G10, G11 or G12 can be outfitted for serious landscape photography at about 1/3rd the weight of a DSLR and lens. Not too bad for a “Point & Shoot” camera!

The Textures of the Guadalupe River

Ask any high school student where and when the best “river tubing” can be found in Texas and nine out of ten will tell you “on the Guadalupe this weekend, Dude”. Ask any landscape photographer where and when the most beautiful cypress trees can be found and they’ll tell you “on the Guadalupe River whenever the kids are back in school”. Which is one of the reasons I schedule the Texas Landscape Safari workshop for the middle of the week well after spring break!

One of my favorite riverside spots is in Guadalupe River State Park near Spring Branch, Texas. The upper Guadalupe river runs through the park in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, and in this spot is a small and fast moving stream lined with tall limestone banks and shaded by 100 year old pecan and bald cypress trees. On a quiet spring afternoon these beautiful trees offer plenty of shade and endless photographic opportunities. The combination of swiftly running water and these huge trees is a favorite subject of many Texas photographers, myself included.

Texture – Guadalupe River State Park, Texas
Copyright © 2010 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon Powershot G10 set on aperture priority (Av) using a circular polarizer. The exposure was taken at 32mm, f/7.1 for 1/2 second at ISO 80. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3. Click on the image above for a larger version.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Canon Powershot G12: From Snapshots to Great Shots

Jeff Carlson’s latest book Canon PowerShot G12: From Snapshots to Great Shots has just been released and is available from Amazon or Peachpit Press right now.Jeff’s books contains five of my favorite landscape shots taken with Canon’s Powershot G Series cameras.

I was honored to be included in this wonderful book which contains a ton of great information for anyone wanting to take better photographs with their G10, G11 or G12 camera.

 

There are also over one hundred spectacular photographs included in this book from amateur and professional photographers across the globe and this alone makes it a “must read” for anyone owning one of these cameras.

As you would expect, most of my images are featured in Chapter 7 – Landscape Photography and the shot below (taken at Palo Duro Canyon) was used as a two-page spread to open the chapter.

Now that I’m done bragging, I’d really like the thank Jeff Carlson and the folks at Peachpit Press for once again including me in their projects. You folks rock!