Lock-down Learnings

I came into 2020 wanting to migrate to Medium Format digital for most of my landscape work, and having just started to build up a system, was then almost immediately forced into lock-down like the rest of the world. So what happens when you plan to become more slow, methodical and deliberate in your landscape photography, but then are suddenly prevented from going outside for any recreational purpose at all, apart from exercise?

Learning & Development

One of the wonderful things about photography is there is always some new to learn or improve upon. Being in lockdown presents a massive opportunity to spend some time developing our knowledge and skills. It could be practical, like learning macro photography at home, or learning aspects of our favourite processing software that we have never tried or feel could be improved on. There are many resources online, from a variety of photographers and organisations who have reduced the cost or given away their online course and resources for free, at least temporarily.

I chose to watch some of my favourite photographers on YouTube, but also some online training for software and various webinars. I also took a paid academic course in Visual Literacy. That led me to read Secret Knowledge by David Hockney, a very interesting and thought-provoking book on the use of optics in the creation of paintings and drawings over the centuries.

My 1 week, 1 walk, 1 prime project

Restricted to one walk a day, which was of necessity walking the dog, I decided to use this as my daily photographic opportunity as well. To keep to the letter and the spirit of the law, as well as deal with the practicalities of having a dog in tow, I had to impose some further restrictions on my photography.

So, I came up with the idea that for each week I would take one prime lens on my lightest camera, no filter, no tripod, in fact nothing else other than a spare battery. I would be shooting handheld on-the-go and within ten minutes or so walk from home, early in the morning.

This was an almost complete reversal of how I saw my photographic approach going at the beginning of the year. After four weeks, just as the restrictions were about to be eased in my area, I realised I had learned a massive amount from this, and it’s probably something I am going to continue to do even after the restrictions are completely lifted. Carrying such light gear can be very liberating.

Kit evaluation & organisation

I had already sold a lot of gear to fund my move to medium format, but I took the time to take another look and pare-down or change-out further than I had before.

In particular, I realised that focal lengths in the ‘normal’ range I don’t really find that useful. I actually sold a lens as result of this process. Although it was a really good lens, I realised why I didn’t use it often and therefore I didn’t need to hang on to it.

I also spent some time organising my gear, so that I can now lay my hands on those stepping rings, tripod spares, filter adapter rings etc., that I would previously struggle to retrieve from various bags and cupboards. Now I have everything organised and labelled.

One minor but particularly beneficial thing was finding and using these labels to organise my 100mm square filters in two Mindshift pouches. Now I don’t have to go through the exercise of pulling out four grads in order to find the one that is actually needed!

Quick Edits

I also learned that just five minutes in Capture One working on an image could produce something significantly more satisfying than the out-of-camera jpegs. That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with those, just that a few quick edits, such as adding a subtle vignette, could really lift an image out of the ordinary. Thinking like this made me consider more the post-processing as I was taking the picture, for example it there was something distracting around the edge of the frame that I could not easily avoid or remove, like a blade of grass or a twig, I would consider whether I would clone this out later or simply mask it a little with a vignette. Although I shoot usually shoot RAW, in my normal way-of-working I typically don’t do ‘quick edits’ preferring to start with the image as ‘finished’ as possible in-camera and then refine it further in Capture One and Photoshop..

Other ISOs are available

Temporarily at least, I stopped being a base-ISO shooter. Of course, base-ISO is rarely an issue when shooting off a tripod, but handheld you have to raise the ISO to deal with camera shake, wind, gloomy woodlands or just dingy days.

Get on with it

Speed - as mentioned this was something I was doing whilst on a walk, so I felt that I could not spend too long composing/taking each image, so I was forcing myself to ‘see’ the image and execute it very quickly.

Intimate landscapes

I don’t live in a particular scenic area, although there is countryside all around, there are no sweeping vista or mountain ranges. But, over these few weeks I think I developed a bit of an eye for the ‘intimate’ landscape - a flower in a hedgerow, frosty leaves etc. I think taking a simpler approach, not being weighed down by equipment or expectations, helped me to see these things more clearly.

Rinse & Repeat

Of course often I often had the opportunity to repeat or try again with the same subject the next day. I also began to make a list of local subjects that are worth exploring further with a more deliberate approach, when I am able to. Some of these I know will be better at other times of the year, so I am effectively building a pipeline of ‘projects’ that I can tackle from home and when conditions are ideal.

Post-Processing Workflow

In the last year of so my post-processing workflow as moved from an assortment of programs, to mainly just one. When Capture One became available as a Fujifilm specific version, and after evaluating the free version I decided the RAW conversion of X-Trans RAW files from my Fujifilm X-T2 cameras was as good if not better than the Silkypix software bundled free with Fujifilm cameras, which in itself seemed to me to produce far better results than Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop or Lightroom.

Before long I had moved to Capture One Pro, and since then I have consolidated my workflow mainly into this tool. Previously I would convert RAW to TIFF in Silkypix, and then work with the latter in Photoshop using Nik Collection plugins, as I had for a number of years right back to my Nikon days. It was also a consideration that I planned to move to Fujifilm GFX medium format as well and keeping a common workflow between this and the X series I already had was a big benefit.

Since moving so Capture One Pro, it seems like the tool has grown with me as Phase One seem to be on a relentless path to improve the product but also provide really useful insights and training via webinars and on-line training.

Today I do almost all of my processing in Capture One. only stepping out of this for specific requirements. I start by creating a session (only available in the Pro version), which effectively is a portable ‘project folder’ that can be moved from SSD where the work is done initially, and then to slower network drives for longer-term storage (see also my post on backups). These days I rarely fill the need to dip into Photoshop, and probably this need will decline even further given the recent updates to Capture One. Similarly, I have stopped using Nik Collection, not because there is anything wrong with it, I just feel that I can do what I need to do quicker and easier now in Capture One.

From Capture One I’ll either create a file tailored for a particular use (i.e. web or Instagram) using a specific process recipe, or I’ll print using Qimage Ultimate. Qimage takes all the hard work out of creating a good quality print, taking care completely of scaling, resolution and sharpening. Once you get the hang of it’s some-what clunky interface, it just works. Output goes to photo paper on a colour laser for quick prints/proofs, or to an Epson SC-P800 loaded (usually) with a roll of 16” paper.

One big change in my workflow in 2020 was getting a Tangent Wave Element Kb. Tangent make high quality controllers for professional photo and video production. The Element series comprises four modules, but I feel the Kb is perhaps the most useful for editing still images. It consists of a small ‘wedge’, about the same depth as a computer keyboard with 12 knobs, 2 buttons and an OLED display. It works seemlessly with Capture One, with the OLED display showing labels. The buttons can be used to cycle through 4 ‘banks’, so there are effectively 48 knobs at your disposal that can be mapped to sliders in Capture One. The OLED display updates as you cycle through the banks, so that the function of each knob is clearly identified.

The Kb comes with a standard out-the-box map for Capture One that works well but you can easily customise this to map each knob to a particular function, using the software downloaded from the Tangent Wave website. You can even decide how fine or coarse the adjustment is, the direction of travel, and choose whether to display a progress bar or percentage that shows in the corresponding part of the OLED display for that knob. All this can be set per control, as well as globally, so you can create a map specific to how you like to work. Each knob also has a push button that resets that particular control.

The only issue I had was that the Tangent Mapper was unreadable on my 4K monitor at full resolution as it doesn’t seem to scale like all my other apps under Windows 10, so every time I wanted to use it I had to drop the resolution to 1920x1080 temporarily. Just an irritation really, as you only need to do this when you want to edit the map.

All this doesn’t come cheap, and even though I picked my unit up used but in mint condition, it was still expensive. That’s reflected in the quality of the overall solution and the hardware though. I’ve tried other solutions, such as adapting a Midi Controller with a custom map, but the Tangent devices are in a different league in terms of usability and function, which is reflected in the high price. Beware that if you try the Kb, you will not want to go back to using a mouse to drag a slider….the ability to look at the image as you make fine adjustments through an ‘analogue’ and tactile control is just so much quicker, intuitive and satisfying.

There are a few specific uses not mentioned already that I do use other software for, so here’s a quick summary:

Stitching Panoramas is done using PTGui. I’ve used this for years, works fabulously well.

Focus Stacking is done using Helicon Focus. Again, works very well, and I particularly like the ability to select images based on time taken. So, if you shoot a stack of images and then re-compose and shoot another stack, Helicon can automatically distinguish between the two sets of images if you specify an interval i.e. 30 seconds between the last image in the first stack and the first image in the second stack.

Merging bracketed images to HDR is something not currently available in Capture One, but is also something I find myself doing less and less, given the excellent HDR exposure tools in the application now. Previously I would have used Nik Collection HDR Efex Pro, but I’ve also started using Photomatix Pro which I run directly from inside Capture One, as explained by Thomas Fitzgerald here.

Goodsync is not a photo-processing app at all, it’s a backup/file synchronisation utility. I use it to backup my Capture One sessions from a local SSD to network storage. I talk about this in a bit more detail here.

Disclaimer

Unless I explicit state otherwise, I do not receive any incentive or inducement from the vendor/distributor of any of the products mentioned.

However, some of the links provided may be affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission which helps me to run this website.

Why 'Medium Format' for landscapes?

Over the years, in film I’ve have shot mainly in 35mm, but in the late 90’s, just prior to the onslaught of digital, I moved to medium format and then briefly to 5x4 film.

Almost 2 decades after switching to digital, and after a couple of years reflection, I realise now that my landscape photography, or at least my satisfaction with it, reached a height during those medium format years. Simply put, my ‘hit-rate’ (i.e. proportion of images I was happy with) has never been as high as it was from a roll of 120 film.

This is not based on the film format or quality, it’s about the whole end-to-end process. In fact, I am more than satisfied with the print quality I can achieve from my current digital cameras.

So what is it about my ‘medium format years’ that I value?

Is this image worth it?

The physical and financial effort of loading film into the camera, and the following processing effort and costs, mean that there was always a consideration of ‘is this shot worth it?’, and following on from that, ‘if it’s not, how can it be improved so it is worthwhile?’. That might mean shifting position a little, waiting for better light, moving on to another composition, or even coming back at another time.

Of course, in the digital world we have already invested in the equipment, and pressing the shutter one more time, or ten thousand times more, costs us nothing. Digital can make us lazy, if we let it.

Keep It Steady, Stupid

I would never, ever have considered not using a tripod when shooting MF or 5x4. Further more, that would be a pretty beefy tripod, to which would be attached a substantial head, and the camera operated via a cable release, with the mirror operated before the shutter.

Basically, to extract the maximum image quality from any imaging device, film or digital, you must ensure the camera cannot shift during the exposure. I learned this hard lesson when I started to shoot 36MP (Nikon D800) alongside 24MP (Nikon D3x). For some reason the D800 image quality did not seem up there with the D3x. Over time I learned that the D800 had a pretty clunky shutter (which Nikon vastly improved in the D810) and need to be locked down hard to get near the D3x for sharpness and detail. The D3x on the other hand, was more tolerant of ‘sloppy’ technique, possibly due to the extra mass of it’s large ‘professional’ body. I go into more detail in this post.

Get Ahead and Go Places

I mentioned heads above, and during those MF years I mostly used a geared head. When I moved to digital, this seemed like over-kill (and probably was for my first 6MP DSLR), so along came a succession of ball-heads.

Nothing wrong with a quality ball-head, but for landscapes a geared head just gives you that extra precision, slows you down and avoids the distraction of adjusting one way, over-shooting or the heading shifting as you lock it, and having to re-adjust. Basically, in this situation, you are now thinking about your equipment more than the image.

A geared head on the other hand, lets you make tiny incremental adjustments in one axis without upsetting the orientation in the other two axis. So now your attention is on the composition, not working around the limitations of your head.

I have more to say about heads here and here.

Slow is Smooth

If you hadn’t picked up on it yet, shooting ‘Medium Format’ for me is all about slowing down, and putting all your energy and effort into getting the most satisfying image. Part of this is your approach, but part of it is removing anything that doesn’t add to the creative process. That might mean practicing so that operating your equipment is second-nature, but it might also mean removing, replacing or upgrading items that get in your way or are distracting.

Basically I want my kit to just work, and not get in my way. I don’t want to step out of a creative ‘zen’ moment or ‘flow-state’ in order to think about what knob adjusts what, how to tighten that clamp or this adjuster.

That stands for tripods, heads, filters, even my camera bag, and of course cameras and lenses themselves.

Think of it like this: in elite sports even marginal gains can make the difference between winning and losing; a world record or also-ran. So, everything is analysed and refined to make those marginal gains.

That’s exactly what I am aiming for - removing all the ‘noise’ that intrudes on the creative process. Nirvana for me would be to setup my tripod, mount camera and lens without conscious thought whilst fully engaging on the scene in front of me.

Disclaimer

Unless I explicit state otherwise, I do not receive any incentive or inducement from the vendor/distributor of any of the products mentioned.

However, some of the links provided may be affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission which helps me to run this website.

Filters in the time of digital

Seems like many people now feel that filters for landscape photography are redundant, whilst others still continue to use them much as they did with film. I am mostly in the latter group, but just recently I made some changes which might help you decide.

So, first off, like I said I am a big fan of using filters in my landscape photographs. Here’s the filters I use and why:

Polariser

A polariser helps to saturate colours, control reflections, cut haze and generally give your images a crisp look, especially if there is a lot of small detail, like foliage or pebbles. The effect is also very difficult to successfully emulate in software, so I would say this is pretty much a must-have for landscapes. It’s a simple, subtle, way to elevate an already good image.

Just be aware that if you are including a lot of clear blue sky in your shot when using a wide angle lens, then the polariser can lead to unnatural-looking sky colours, as the intensity of the polarising effect varies depending on the angle to the sun. In those circumstances, if in doubt, take a shot with and without.

Neutral Density

The long exposure ‘Big Stopper’ look has really taken off in the last decade, and I would say at least a couple of these are useful to have in your kit. A 10 stop and a 3 or 4 stop are a good mix. 10 stop will give you that long exposure look in the middle of the brightest day, and a less dense ND does the same in blue hour, plus is useful for smoothing out moving water during the day, especially if used with a polariser that will tend to also extend your shutter speed by an additional 1-stop to 1.5-stops.

One really useful aspect of the 10 stop filter is when the sky in your scene may be a bit boring - even a wisp of cloud can be converted to more interesting streaks and lines by a really long exposure.

ND’s can be variable in quality, with some not being particularly neutral and therefore putting a colour shift on your image, and also the density may not be accurate which can make getting an accurate exposure quite time-consuming. Here’s a top tip from Greg Benz on how to easily and quickly get accurate exposures with a dense filter.

Graduated Neutral Density

This is where the discussion gets more interesting. ND Grads are designed to help you balance the exposure between a bright sky and the darker land. In effect, they help to compress the dynamic range of the scene so it fits more easily into the range of tones your camera can capture. This in turn renders the scene much closer to how our brains interpret it (when we see blue sky and green fields, our camera ‘sees’ bright sky/green fields or blue sky/dark fields, depending on where we set the exposure).

There are two arguments that say grads are no longer necessary with digital. Firstly, you can shoot several shots at different exposures (bracketing) and then merge these later in software. Secondly, many software tools and camera sensors are now very very good at extracting data from the shadow and highlight areas of an image, so a lot of detail can be recovered in post-processing. Greg Benz has posted some great how-to videos here that will help you understand how this works.

Grads coming in different densities, I find 2-stop useful when the light is coming from behind the camera, and a 3-stop more useful then the light is coming from in front of the camera. There are hard and soft transitions between the ND part of the filter and the clear part. Which you choose depends on the scene and the dimensions of your camera sensor (general rule is, the smaller the sensor, the harder the transition should be).

Reverse grads are useful when the sun is low in the sky, especially in coastal scenes. This kind of filter is at it’s most dense at the transition line, and then becomes less dense towards the top of the filter. Because of the brighter nature of the scene, I find these most useful in 3-stop and 4-stop values.

As you’ll see I don’t view the option to use or not use grads as binary, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Red Enhancer

I have an old glass Lee Red Enhancer filter which is really useful for autumn colours and sunrise and sunset. It’s a subtle effect that just seems to tease out that extra bit of saturation and intensity of reds, whilst leaving the rest of the image largely unchanged. It can also be useful in astrophotography to reduce the effects of light pollution. Lee no longer make these, but similar products exist today marketed as light pollution filters, with a didymium or neodymium coating, such as this one from H&Y.

So what’s my filter kit?

Since I also started to shoot medium format digital at the start of 2020, I also decided to upgrade and replace my old 100mm system resin filters with H&Y 100mm glass square system filters. Their magnetic holder makes adjusting grads easy and I find that their glass filters are a significant step up from my old resin filters in terms of sharpness and lack of colour casts. They are also much more resistant to marks and scratches, in fact the H&Y grads are said to be practically indestructible, being made form Corning Gorilla glass.

Medium Format Filter Kit

• H&Y Polariser and holder

• H&Y 2 & 3 stop hard grads

• H&Y 2 & 3 stop soft grads

• H&Y 3 & 4-stop reverse grads

All that, plus adapter rings, fits in a Mindshift Filter Hive, attached to the waist belt of my Mindshift Rotation 180 Professional backpack. My Lee Red Enhancer, in a H&Y magnetic frame, goes on it’s own in the waistpack with my camera.

In the main pack is a MIndshift Filter Hive Mini are my ND filters:

• Nisi 3 stop ND (in H&Y magnetic frame)

• H&Y 6 ND

• H&Y 10 stop ND

• H&Y 10 stop circular ND

That last 10 stop filter fits in the holders’ polariser slot so when using an ultra-wide angle lens it’s still allows the use of a graduated filter, without vignetting, on a Fujifilm GFX 23mm lens (18mm equivalent). As mentioned earlier, I am unlikely to use a polariser with a lens this wide when there is a significant area of sky in the image, so there are few situations where I would use a polariser and a grad at the same time on the 23mm.

APS Filter Kit

For my APS camera I decided that I really wanted to have the option to prioritise compactness and weight over completeness. So even though I can (and often do) use the system listed above with my smaller cameras, I sometimes pare my filters down to a lot less.

The way I do this is, first, I don’t bother with grads. As explained above, there are a lot of ways to get around this during post-processing, or using bracketing. So for APS cameras, I take just three circular filters:

• 77mm SRB Polariser

• 77mm SRB 4 stop ND

• 77mm SRB 10 stop ND

And that’s it. I have these filters in the largest size (77mm) I need, and then use stepping rings to adapt to the lenses I am carrying. I stack these all together with a lens cap on the front and a Gobe metal screw cap on the rear. This makes for a compact and very lightweight package. I was so pleased with this I built a second set to match my smallest/lightest lens set in 58mm diameter, which weighs only 60g and can be slipped easily into to a any pocket.

Disclaimer

Unless I explicit state otherwise, I do not receive any incentive or inducement from the vendor/distributor of any of the products mentioned.

However, some of the links provided may be affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission which helps me to run this website.

Gnarbox 2.0 Review

After a long wait, I finally received my Gnarbox 2.0 in September 2019.

What is it?

A compact on-the-go backup device with additional capabilities via mobile apps for editing of stills and video without a laptop, using a mobile device.

What’s it like?

The original Gnarbox looked a little, how shall I say it, umm, home-made. The 2.0 by contrast looks and feels like a high quality professional product. It feels tough and resilient, without being overly heavy, and inspires confidence. The buttons feel nice and the battery clicks in place with reassuring solidity. Even the packaging is nicely done.

Gnarbox 2.0 has an internal SSD, an integral SD card reader and a USB C port to connect external drives, plus a micro-HDMI port. I went for a 512GB capacity model plus an extra battery, which was available to pre-order on Kickstarter for $550.

Seems expensive?

Yep, but if I contrast the Gnarbox 2.0 with two other cheaper devices I have tried, it actually starts to look like good value.

The Western Digital MyPassport SSD (bought as a stop-gap whilst waiting for the Gnarbox) never functionally reliably for me, it always seemed to drop the wireless connection and I found the mobile app a bit clunky. In the end I gave up and went back to using an old Windows Netbook.

After that I tried the much cheaper RAV Power Filehub (2019 version RP0009). This device has no internal storage, but has so much potential. Unfortunately, it misses out on delivering what I want from photography backup device, by trying to be too many things. The no-touch backup option is great, where you just insert a SD card and it automatically backs it up to an attached USB drive.

Unfortunately, there is no option to make this an incremental backup, so unless you are wiping your SD cards after every backup, you may quickly fill up your external storage. Personally, I like to keep images on the SD card as long as possible or until I have at least two backups (and preferably one of those in cloud storage).

On that last point, I just never got either of these devices to work smoothly and reliably with Dropbox or OneDrive. In fact, with the Filehub, the only way I got this to work was to unplug the USB drive, connect this to my phone with a USB Host (OTG) adapter, and then use my phone to copy the files to Dropbox. All very fiddly, and easy to lose or forget the OTG cable…..

By contrast, the Gnarbox 2.0 offers the possibility to incrementally back-up your cards to the internal SSD, and to back up the internal storage to Dropbox once the Gnarbox gets a WiFi connection (back at your hotel for instance). In addition, the Gnarbox internal SSD can be incrementally backed-up to external storage.

All of this can be achieved in a very seamless way, with professional features like a MD5 Checksum to verify that the data has been transferred correctly. Backing up SD cards to the internal storage doesn’t require anything else, no cable, no dongles or adapters. There’s literally nothing to forget or lose, except the Gnarbox charger and cable (more on that below).

In addition the Gnarbox apps bring another layer of functionality, in terms of image selection and post-processing, without a laptop. The micro HDMI port is for reviewing images or video on an external screen (hotel room TV for example). So, with a suitable mobile device, like an ipad, the theory is the ipad provides the user interface, the external screen provides an expanded view, and the Gnarbox does the heavy-lifting in terms of processing power (it’s actually a pretty powerful device).

OK, so what’s it really like in practice?

More or less as soon as the Gnarbox arrived, I was off to Germany for a few days, so it was an ideal opportunity to try it out, as I would be travelling light and there was no room for a laptop or an extensive camera outfit, just a body and a couple of lenses.

Gnarbox needs a USB C PD outlet of at least 30W output to charge, and as I didn’t have one, I made sure to slip the supplied charger into my carry-on, along with a Samsung Extreme SSD. The charger adapts to UK/Euro/US wall sockets and has an additional USB A socket for charging another device simultaneously (although limited to 1A). I later swopped my ‘standard’ travel charger to an this Anker one with 45W PD.

Setting the unit up was relatively stress-free, once you get your head around the two wireless modes. Home is for when you have access to an internet connection via WiFi i.e. hotel room, airport etc, and is ideal when you want to perform backup to Dropbox for example. Field, as the name implies is for when you don’t have access to an internet connection, and the Gnarbox creates it’s own WiFi hotspot that you can connect your mobile device to, in order to browse your images.

I found though that the small but very clear OLED display and the four unmarked buttons actually work pretty intuitively, and after a few minutes experimenting there really was no need to connect a mobile device to perform basic tasks like a backup.

One glitch I did have is that at first I was unable to setup a cloud backup as Dropbox temporarily ‘froze’ connections from the Gnarbox Safekeep app. I had to wait until the next day to set this up and test it, but it did work fine after that. Hopefully this was just a one-off misunderstanding and shouldn’t occur again, and this is a one-time activity anyway, unless you change your Dropbox account or Gnarbox.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to like about the Gnarbox, and may be a lot more if you are a video maker and need to edit on the road.

But, overall there are cheaper solutions out there, not least of which is to buy a OTG connector, card reader and a big storage card for your phone. Or, there are more comprehensive solutions at similar cost, like a Surface Go tablet, on which you could do some cataloguing and basic editing (although you would need to add some additional storage).

Good

• Very decent build

• Feels rugged

• Good battery life

• Incremental backups

• MD5 checksum

Not so good

• Expensive

• Flicking between wireless modes could be a bit slicker/more intuitive

Disclaimer

Unless I explicit state otherwise, I do not receive any incentive or inducement from the vendor/distributor of any of the products mentioned.

However, some of the links provided may be affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission which helps me to run this website.