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DIY Flash Mount For A Beauty Dish

Hav­ing a lit­tle time under my hands this morn­ing, I went to the shed, fired up the gas heat­ing and built a flash mount from parts I already had — a L-bracket with Bowens S-mount, a grip, an aluminium-rail (left over from some other acces­sories), some screws and 45 min­utes time.

This thing is pri­mar­ily to be used with my beauty dish. This is my favourite light­former any­way. So if you want to use your com­pact flash/speedlight — a Nissin DI-622 in my case — along with your deauty dish (or other stuio light­former), you might be inter­ested to read this lit­tle DIY-tutorial. Sorry for the crappy pho­tos, which I took with my HTC…

So, these are the parts I had.

diy_schiene_dish_01

 

First I had to make the exist­ing rail a lit­tle longer with another a piece I had. So I drilled a hole into it — with a gim­let that must be 100 years old (as the bench vise), but I love it!

diy_schiene_dish_02

 

After assem­bling the whole thing with nuts and bolts and mount­ing the L-bracket it looks like this. Nifty…

diy_schiene_dish_03

 

Later at the stu­dio — the com­plete kit on my 5dmk2.

diy_schiene_dish_04

 

and the backside…

diy_schiene_dish_05

 

And this is what the out­come looks like — no edit­ing at all. Raw. Gotta love it, no?

diy_schiene_dish_07

 

BTW: This is Sally, my light-model. She is a very patient per­son. And I love her. ;)

My lit­tle dish is ~40 cm in diam­e­ter. It now sits a lit­tle left from and over the lens. Per­fect. In my view it dou­bles the useability-factor of the speedlite by at least x2. And the dish can still be used on strobe-heads in stu­dio AND with the speedlite. Dual use is always a good thing. I can think of many occa­sion where it makes sense to use this combination.

It is heavy, a bit clumsy, yes. But the light is worth the effort IMHO.

And light is, what pho­tog­ra­phy is all about, right?

If you have any ques­tions, don’t hes­i­tate to ask and I will gladly help if I can.

Selling Photos

I think I finally found a way to cre­ate a gallery that is pri­mar­ily meant to sell pho­tos — either by email-order or instant down­load. I have spent days, lit­er­ally, with my research, but all I found was either not func­tional, over­sized or way too expen­sive.
The ingre­di­ents: Word­Press as the gen­eral frame­work for the site, an iframe-plugin to dis­play the respec­tive gallery, gen­er­ated by Foto­player, and pay­pal.
And here is why: WP is flex­i­ble, good look­ing and easy to cus­tomize. But the reg­u­lar WP-galleries won’t do the job, as there is hardly a way to use them for e-commerce-purposes — at least not in Ger­many where you have to fol­low extremely rigid reg­u­la­tions.
This is where Foto­player comes in handy. Not only it is avail­able also as a plugin for Light­room — thus inte­grates flaw­lessly into my work­flow -, it cre­ates beau­ti­ful look­ing flash-galleries, has tons of options to tweak the look and extras and comes with a nifty shopping-cart, where clients can choose var­i­ous image-sizes, order prints or down­load hi-res-files imme­di­ately after pay­ment. It also can export the gal­leries directly via FTP to the site — into a folder that is not part of the WP-loop. But: You can use an iframe in an arti­cle or page of WP to dis­play it. And bingo — all require­ments met!
I got it work­ing on my local Xampp and after some more test­ing I will use it on my busi­ness site ASAP. ;)

Color Management

As I found out that I have a prob­lem with color fidelity in my work­flow I decided to do some­thing about it with­out any fur­ther ado.

I spent way too much time fix­ing tints in my stu­dio shots espe­cially. The crit­i­cal color is: red. As many oth­ers report this too I guess that part of the probem is that the Canons tend to be too red per se. Things get even worse since my strobes which claim to give me 5600K (+-200) are not reli­able for that mat­ter and add even more red or plain magenta.

As long I take sin­gle shots this is easy to deal with (and doesn’t mat­ter much any­way), but I’ve been doing some portrait-series lately and when I look at sev­eral shots from the same shoot­ings side by side I notice an incon­sis­tency that is bad. Espe­cially as these pho­tos often also hang side by side on the wall at my clients’ places.

I man­aged to repair that though (shoot­ing RAW is always help­ful!), but it takes too much pre­cious time. And it is not that pro­fes­sional either. Way too much guess­ing in the game for my taste. Even more so, as Adobe LR does not offer AdobeRGB (my pref­ered color space) in pro­cess­ing, but only ProPhoto. This is man­age­able as long as pho­tos are exported in AdobeRGB to PS which is an option in LR, but I’d def­i­nitely pre­fer to stay in one color space all the way. As much as I like Light­room, I am also test­ing Cap­ture One now as RAW-processor and a pos­si­ble alternative.

 

So here is what I’ll do: Man­ual WB for each shoot­ing and sub-shooting with the help of the Col­orchecker Pass­port. And I will also cal­i­brate my mon­i­tors involved — studio-laptops (for teth­ered shoot­ing), desktop-PCs (for edit­ing) — with the Spy­der 3 Pro. I ordered both the Col­orchecker and the Spy­der today for a total of 200 €. This seems a fair price for the time I hope to save in process. Besides I’ll tweak the cam­era set­tings and make some ded­i­cated pro­files for my use.

Soon I’ll report if and how it worked.

Reng-deng-a-deng-deng-a-deng

Yes­ter­day I started to build the fleet of my young enter­prise. I guess some would have lent some money from the bank and get a fancy car — like a Mer­cedes or Porsche or some­thing. Damn posers…

I pref­ered to buy a used Vespa Cosa 125 and pay it cash from my pocket. This iconic beauty is 18 years old, has 12.000 km on the speedo and still runs like a charm. I got the test cer­tifi­cate for another 2 years with­out any problems.

The color is almost exactly the same as in my cor­po­rate design ;) This’ll make it easy to turn into a rolling adver­tis­ing vehi­cle for my reg­u­lar tours to town. Besides it is quite prac­ti­cal as I can park it vir­tu­ally any­where. And I am actu­ally faster than by car.

Com­ing from a BMW R1100RS with 10x the capac­ity and HP it is some­thing I need to get used to, but it is a fun to ride, yeah. ;) I’ll sell the BMW now, as I can­not hope to ride it often any­more. No more time and also too much pain in my neck and back. On the Vespa Cosa I sit bolt upright. No prob­lem at all.

I think I will also trade my Mini Cooper soon for a VW bus. I just need more trans­port capac­ity for my gear. And I can use it as a camper too.

Digital Studio-Workflow

Per­haps you guys are inter­ested how I orga­nize the (dig­i­tal) work­flow in my stu­dio. So here you are…

We need:
– Camera(s)
– Lap­top (or PC)
– NAS (Net­work Attached Stor­age)
– Desk­top PC
– LAN (Giga­bit in my case)

I’ll try to keep this con­cise. If you have any ques­tions and/or need details, feel free to ask.

I shoot in RAW–mode. The cam­era is set to M (man­ual) and is con­nected to my lap­top via a (long) USB-cable. I’m run­ning Adobe Light­room on the lap­top with the Canon Tether-module activated.

Time to Rock’n Roll ;)

I use the lap­top for a quick check of the light-setup (shad­ows, reflec­tions etc) and sort out the junk. The good ones are rated/marked. I also keep the sec­ondary choices.

Then I export the folder hold­ing the fresh pho­tos as a cat­a­logue from within LR to the NAS. There is a spe­cial folder for that which has been added to my lap­top as a net­work drive. One could sim­ply copy the files with explorer or what­ever you use as file­m­an­ager too — but: In this case you’d loose all the markings/ratings! So do your­self a favor and export your stuff as catalogue…

I move my ass to Big Mama (the desk­top PC), start Adobe LR and import the fresh cat­a­logue from the NAS and — voilà — I have all my pre­s­e­lected pho­tos where I need them. Ready to edit them in LR and/or PS, tag, print, email, ftp them — whatever…

My deskop-PC is backed up on a weekly basis to the NAS, so the data on both are in sync. This is mainly because a NAS (even with RAID, which I rec­om­mend) is not a backup per se! Never for­get that. I use a nifty tool called dsyn­chro­nize for this pur­pose, but any NAS comes with a backup-tool, if you pre­fer that. Redun­dancy is your best friend ;)

On a gen­eral note: Don’t store your LR-data on the NAS directly. It is pos­si­ble, but slow. And LR does not allow the cat­a­logue itself on a network-drive anyway.

How To Enhance WP-theme Autofocus+ V2.0

As you can see on the front­page, I am using Aut­o­fo­cus+ Pro for this blog.

This fan­tas­tic theme has just been updated to V 2.0. This is not a minor update, because AF II (Pro) does not rely on the Thematic-framework any­more. And it comes with a sam­ple child-theme, which I highly rec­om­mend to use!!

Why? Because a the genious con­cept of child-themes lets you pimp, hack, enhance your theme, with­out los­ing all your cus­tomiza­tions in case of an update. Also there are only a few files you have to take care of. Well, actu­ally it can become many — depend­ing on your creativity…

All you have to do is upload the child-theme to a sep­a­rate folder along with the main theme of Aut­o­fo­cus  and acti­vate it — yes, the child, not Big Mama!!

Any­thing you want to change goes into that folder: func­tions, css, tem­plates… whatever.

Once the child-theme is acti­vated, mother will always look what her child has to say about it before she feeds any­thing to the WordPress-loop.

When I first used AF Pro, I imme­di­ately stum­bled into a prob­lem. Fear not, it can be solved eas­ily. The old hack for for­mer ver­sions, that I explained a year ago, does not work any­more, so here is the new way to do it.

The theme has a cou­ple of options. One of them is that you can define a cat­e­gory and a tem­plate for a blog page. But: You can only pick just one cat­e­gory in the theme-options which is used for this spe­cial page. If you want to use the blog-template for another page which only holds arti­cles with a dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory — in my case the KnowHow-page — you are stuck.

So what to do?

You could ask the author of the theme for help. Pro or not Pro-version (paid or not paid), he will point you to — yes, right — google, in order to find solu­tions for cre­at­ing your own tem­plates. You can do that of course — or read on…

Yeah ‚theres tons of expla­na­tions for that.Try googling it.

— Allan Cole

I solved the prob­lem myself the fol­low­ing way.

I copied the file blog-page.php from the theme. Best is to down­load it with a ftp-client (I use the client inte­grated in Total­com­man­der) to a folder on your HD. Then copy it twice (or more, depends on how many sub-sections you want to have blog-wise!) and give the files mean­ing­ful names. For exam­ple, if the blog-page you are going to use it for, is called “Design”, name it design-template.php.

Edit the renamed file with an edi­tor of your choice (I rec­om­mend notepad++) and change the name of the tem­plate in line 3 to Design Tem­plate (or what­ever you want it to be).

Exam­ple:
/**
* Template Name: AF+ Blog Template - pimped by mic
*
* A custom page template without sidebar.
*
* The "Template Name:" bit above allows this to be selectable
* from a dropdown menu on the edit page screen.
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage AutoFocus_Two
* @since AutoFocus 2.0
*/

get_header(); ?>

!! If you miss this step, the tem­plate will never appear in the dropdown-menu for tem­plates on the right when you cre­ate a new page or change the prop­er­ties of an exist­ing one.
It is a merely inter­nal thing though. This has noth­ing to do with the name of the blog-page or –cat­e­gory and will not appear any­where on the pub­lic part of your blog.

Next we look for a line that looks like this:

$af_blog_catid = of_get_option( $shortname . '_blog_cat' );

and change it to (for example):

$af_blog_catid = 19;

!! whereas 19 is the ID of the cat­e­gory I use for the given page (KnowHow).
For you the num­ber may and will dif­fer! This means that you have to cre­ate this cat­e­gory first — or, if it already exists, find out its ID.
You can see the ID (the num­ber) in the bot­tom left cor­ner of your browser, when you hover the cat­e­gory in the category-menu (BTW: This is use­ful for many purposes!).

So in my case the com­plete block (here with com­ments for eas­ier under­stand­ing & doc­u­men­taion) looks like this:

// Start the loop for the Blog Category
global $paged, $more, $shortname;
$more = 0;
/* the original line with parsing cat_id from theme-options - hack below */
/* $af_blog_catid = of_get_option( $shortname . '_blog_cat' ); */
$af_blog_catid = 1; /*this is the "General" category on my blog*/

Wipe the sweat from your fore­head, get a drink. Your’re almost done ;)

Upload the new template(s) to the child-theme-directory on your webspace.

Then you cre­ate the new page called Design (or what­ever) and attach the appro­pri­ate tem­plate (e.g. design-template) to it by using Edit/Quickedit from the property-section of “Pages”.

On the page you’ve now cre­ated and mar­ried with the hacked tem­plate from above, only arti­cles with the defined category-ID (19 in this exam­ple) will appear.

Nifty ;)

And in case you want to cre­ate another page for another cat­e­gory of arti­cles sim­ply repeat the same steps (down­load, copy, rename, find out the category-ID, edit, upload, assign tem­plate to new page …) and you’re done.

Oh, and this should work as well for the free ver­sion of the autofocus+-theme. I guess. Did not check though. But I can’t see why it shouldn’t ;)

If have any ques­tions, feel free to ask.

DeviantArt Tolerates Porn, Nazis and Violation of Copyright

After seven years I closed down my account on DeviantArt.

Well, I did not close it alto­gether yet, because I want some recent jour­nals to be acces­si­ble as they explain my reasons.

The short ver­sion is:
DeviantART tol­er­ates theft of pho­tos and/or use of stolen mate­r­ial on their site.
They tol­er­ate plain porn dis­guised as “artis­tic nude”.
And they tol­er­ate the infil­tra­tion at large scale by Nazis.

Hmm, my jour­nals seem to be still acces­si­ble, although I do not know why. So you can read, judge and hope­fully under­stand, why I finally gave up on deviant“ART”.

If you want to get more info on this I sug­gest you hop over and read my last 3 or 4 jour­nals and the attached discussions.

This also means that the role of this blog will change. It used to be a side-project. From now on it’ll be my main organ. The port­fo­lio will soon start to fill up. So stay tuned if you wish.

This morn­ing I closed the account com­pletely, after some­one whom I con­sid­ered a friend, called my argu­men­ta­tion “polit­i­cal bull­shit”, pro­posed that I should rather have “left  in dig­nity” and writ­ten a let­ter to the admins instead of mak­ing such a fuss pub­licly, and expressed that I obvi­ously believed that with my measly member-fee I had also  “bought the right to whine”…

And that was only the per­sonal part.

I was and still am speechless.

Of course I know how volatile and ques­tion­able these “vir­tual friend­ships” are. But com­ing from some­one whom I actively sup­ported for a long time, whom I fought for in his dog­fights with other deviants — I must say, that hurts.

I would not expect any grat­i­tude, not even loyal sup­port or blind shar­ing of my views. No, but I do expect not be kicked in the face by such a per­son like that.

This is sad.

Yes, Richard, Mr. Trippy4U, I know what you think: He’s whin­ing again…

But at least I don’t have to pay for it.

I hope they’ll at least give you some extra months for free for being such a loyal deviant.

Apple Tracks You!

Per­son­ally I wish Steve Jobs all the best.

But I will cer­tainly not con­tribute to his his eco­nomic success.

I never had an iPhone nor an iPad nor an iPod — and I most prob­a­bly never will.

I am pretty pissed off how many media, online-media namely, dance around the golden apple.

I am not a fan of data-mining. And/or of back­doors that man­u­fac­tur­ers build into elec­tronic devices. I like it transparent.

And now that I read that iPads and iPhones track and save the move­ment of users — why am I not surprised??

Curi­ous?

FF4 sucks

Fire­fox has been my favourite browser for many years. But FF4 is plain dis­ap­point­ing. I’m not talk­ing about the looks — that’s more or less okay. Nowa­days most browsers mimic the look (and some­times func­tion­al­ity) of Opera any­way. No, the thing is: It crashes fre­quently and is darn slow.

I had more crashes in a few weeks than I ever had in years! And this is not a Beta or RC. And of course I started with a fresh pro­file and use only a lim­ited choice of plugins.

Also it takes up to 28 sec­onds until FF shows up after “started”. It is sup­posed to be the fastest FF ever — I can­not con­firm that. Opera and SWR­Iron run much smoother on my sys­tem. Not to men­tion KMeleon which beats them all anyway.

If you have a look at the rel­e­vant bul­letin boards you’ll see that many other users report the same prob­lems. FF4 seems pretty under­done to me…

Coin­ci­dence that FF5 has been announced already? I say: Again some­one used us as betat­esters with­out say­ing so. I clearly dis­like that kind of behav­ior — this is Microsoft-like…

So… FF4 ist set on hold for the time being. Using KMeleon 1.6b with a cou­ple of help­ful exten­sions instead.

Oh and the sec­ond Mozilla snail is deac­ti­vated too. I replaced Thun­der­bird with Claws-Mail. Much faster, respon­sive and extremely pow­er­ful. Import­ing my mail­base was just a mat­ter of clicks — sev­eral clicks though, as I had to han­dle six mail-accounts with lots of sub-folders ;)

Mozilla is not on a good track cur­rently IMHO.

How to get Autofocus+ working with new Thematic theme

This info is dep­re­cated, since AF+ now does not rely on The­matic anymore.

… and comes with a sam­ple child-theme of its own, which I highly rec­om­mend to use!!

 

Some­one asked how I got the look on my front­page with Aut­o­fo­cus+. At first I did not under­stand, as I had not done any­thing spe­cial about it. But after updat­ing the The­matic theme, which is the mommy of  Aut­o­fo­cus+, I saw what had hap­pened. No mat­ter which layout-option of Aut­o­fo­cus+ you chose, the front­page always looked weird, a two-column-layout with­out the usual nifty auto­siz­ing of pho­tos on the frontpage.

So you have to add some lines to the functions.php of the childtheme — Aut­o­fo­cus+ in this case — right after the first line of code with open­ing


// little hack for new thematic theme
define('THEMATIC_COMPATIBLE_BODY_CLASS', true);
define('THEMATIC_COMPATIBLE_POST_CLASS', true);
define('THEMATIC_COMPATIBLE_COMMENT_FORM', true);
define('THEMATIC_COMPATIBLE_FEEDLINKS', true);

This should do the trick and solve other issues as well that might occur.