Monday, April 23, 2012

BigBag Bigmicmacbag a sosobag by bigsoso


BigSoSo, the transport Bag for your Apple!

So it is advertised on the WorldWideWeb, as i needed a transport protection for my 21.5" iMAC i ordered one and today the packet arrived from LaPaz Bolivia.










It looks really well built, good first impression, quality materials and the iMAC fits perfectly





Plenty of protection mousse all around, but i would not try to throw it to see how far it can fly...


As i was a big soso lazy today i made the pictures with my phone :-)

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Follow the white rabbit

Steffi, MUA Evelien Van Tigghel

Just follow the white rabbit, crazy stuff is sure to happen :-)




Most people are pretty sure that my pictures are almost unprocessed, don't know why, maybe they look to natural? But i don't really care what people think, i just follow what i feel is right for me, commercial or not i really don't care, just shoot what you are comfortable with,  i've done it now for many years ;-)

But unprocessed, they are not.

This is to give you a little idea of what i look at during post:




It doesn't always come out, during post i can change my mind and i decided to add a bunch of warmth to this one



let's go on with the rest of the shoot:




We went in the car park and tried out some more out of the box stuff, just let go of everything you know and go with the flow ...







3 girls and a couch

3 Girls (Sandro, Clea, Sarah), 1 amazing stylist (Glen Franssen) and a great Make-up Artist (Sybille De Beuckelaer) and a couch...

I'm not gonna go very deep in the lighting setup, it's pretty easy, ring flash with beauty dish = on axis light at his best :-)














body Curves (NSFW)

I love skin, real skin, perfect skin, unclothed skin, skin is amazing...

Made during one of our Workshops where we go into a deeper approach of controlling light...


One more after the jump (NSFW!!)

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The Nikon dudes.

No really, what is wrong with the Nikon dudes, "Dark to see the logic" would be the words of master Yoda...

I understand that the earthquake, Tsunami and flooding in Thailand caused some problems and delayed the arrival of the nikon D800, but we had great cameras at our disposal for some years, like the D300(s), D700, D3, D3s, D3x,... so it was no problem waiting for the upgrade (not for me anyway)

But a few months ago things started moving, oh-oh-oh big Nikon announcement !!

Nikon D800, D800e and the D4 are announced, D800 with 36Mpix, wow! Nikon D4, the new low-light king, nice job Nikon!

But for me what follows is the weird and illogical part :

I think i can say that Wi-Fi has become a pretty well established standard over the last years, hardware and drivers readily available, to prove this 99% of every laptop, notebook, smart-phone, tablet, ... has on-board Wi-fi and I've seen the chips, they are small, the antenna is another question.

Now the D800 has no networking onboard, if you want to connect it trough Wi-Fi wireless connection you have to purchase the (older) Nikon Wt-4(a), extra cost of about €700 and it's bulky


The D4 has an Ethernet connection, very nice Nikon but if you want to use it trough Wi-Fi, Nikon has the new Wt-5a for you, extra cost about €800, good morning to you sir ...

So if you buy like a D4 and a D800 you got to buy both wireless transmitters because they are not compatible...

But ok, the Wt5 is going to be the new standard? It's smaller and probably faster, so that's a good thing!

( The fact that the D800 uses the older Wt-4 solution proves that this camera should have been released at least 6 month earlier, if it was developed by the same team as the D-4 it would also make use of the newer Wt-5 )

And than a few days ago Nikon announced their new entry-level Dslr, the Nikon D3200.

Oh yes and they did it again... the Nikon D3200 can be connected by Wi-Fi using an EXTERNAL connector, wtf? And logic would assume that it's going to be compatible with the rest, but no, again it's a new design, the Wu-1a, sold for about €50.

I guess the dudes in Sendai just think "oh those clazy plofessional photoglaphels make enough money to spend mole on geal"

Wtf, logic this Mr Spock!


Wednesday, April 18, 2012

upgrading co$ts

After working for 3 years on the same Windows based system i finally decided to upgrade my system and went for an "Apple".

My first idea was to go for a MacBook pro because i wanted a system i could move to the studio for tethered shooting, after doing some research i found that the MacBook screens are not IPS based technology (almost no laptop has an IPS screen), so if i wanted to get the most out of it i had to buy an additional screen like an Eizo or something = additional costs + more cumbersome setup but easy if i wanted to take the MacBook only..

My second idea was to go for an iMac 21'5 and this is what i finally bought, I ordered a big carrying case at Bigsoso to take the system with me between my working place and the studio, maybe i'll add a MacBook pro next year or so, but for now i got a pretty good solution that went easy on my bank account. (Well easy...)




But (there's always a but) at the studio i used to work tethered on my Windows Machine, for this i bought 2 simple 3meter long USB cables that i connected together (one cable was male -female, second cable was male - male, usb B ).

A perfect 6 meter long connection between the Windows computer with Lightroom and my Nikon D700 :-)

So i tried the same, 2x3m USB cable between the iMAC and the D700 = no connection

hmmm... maybe i should add a powered USB hub?

So i tried = iMac -> powered USB hub -> 2x3m USB cable -> D700 = no connection

hmmm... €20,00 spend on a useless USB hub...

So i tried = iMac -> 1x3m USB cable  -> original Nikon USB cable -> = Hallelujah! Connected, but only a working radius of 4 meter :-(

Then i tried connecting this to the USB connector in the Mac Keyboard to win 0,5m but this again resulted in a "no connection".

I'll try using an active USB cable in a future setup but thought i'll put this online, maybe it's useful for somebody or maybe somebody can explain me why the 6meter solution works on a Windows machine but not on the iMac machine ...

EDIT:

I received a 10 meter active USB cable, works like a charm on the Windows PC, but on the iMAC i can not make a connection, the camera is detected by the system as you can see here :



Edit 2. (18-April-2012)

I was in contact with TetherTools.com about this problem and according to their experiences one should never attempt to use passive USB cables longer than 5 meters on the iMAC.

I ordered pretty expensive USB 3.0 cables, 2 x 16 ft with 2 activators, these shoud do the trick for the D700 and the D800.

At this moment i'm pretty sure my next laptop will not be a Macbook but probably a simple Windows machine with USB 3.0 support, time will tell...

Edit 3 (06-June-2012)

Today I received 2 brand new USB3.0 gold plated active cables from Tethertools.com

1)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

Import Works
Tethering Works

2)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

Import Works
Tethering Works

3)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D700

No Camera detected

4)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

Import Works
Tethering not yet supported bij Adobe Lightroom

5)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

Import = Camera appears for 1 or 2 seconds in the Lightroom interface and than it disappears = No Camera detected (very weird)
Tethering not yet supported bij Adobe Lightroom

6)
Imac <-> usb 2.0 port <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0cable <-> Tethertools 5meter USB 3.0 cable <-> nikon usb 2.0 cable <-> Nikon D800e

No Camera detected



To be continued ...