Free Photography Training at Worcester Cathedral -January 2010

As a Christmas Present to you all I am offering a FREE photography training session this year. If you have just received a new digital compact camera for Christmas and want to know how to use it, or a new digital SLR camera and want to start learning more advanced techniques this FREE photography training workshop is for you. A FREE photography training session is available for the first 20 people who contact me with the message FREE PHOTOGRAPHY TRAINING WORKSHOP 2010, I will email you back all the details. The session will be one to one tuition at a group workshop for one hour at Worcester Cathedral in January 2010.

UPDATE: 17 places left - don't miss out on free photography training in January

UPDATE: 14 places left - This will be a great day out don't leave it to late

Making people more relaxed

If you want to make people more comfortable when you photographing them the best advice i can give you is leave them to talk to each other and grab a candid shot.

Moving this blog to our main website.....

I have decided to move this training blog to our new site, as you may have noticed i have not been able to update this blog as we have been so busy with our wedding photography business and training workshops.

go to

www.pureprints.com/blog

Sold the 5DMk2 and the 40D

I have decided to part with the 5D Mk2 and the 40D and stick with the good old Canon 5D. I am now taking my own advice i give out every week at training workshops. I am limiting my kit and keeping it very simple. My main reason is the 5Dmk2 has horible colour problems. The 40D has great colour but poor sharpness and weirdness that i cant explain without showing you. The 5D has great colour great sharpness great exposure latitude/ tonal range and just works without having to think. Canon also put the ISO button in different positions on all three cameras which makes them a pain to use together when you are in a hurry. I think canon will need to produce a brand new camera from the ground up like nikon have with the D3. Its time for them to decide on a standard layout of controls and make camera 'SIMPLE' to use....that is all we want. SIMPLE cameras.

Rich

Starting Your Photography Business

It is now wedding season and we are run off our feet, but i still like to offer the odd days training. I get asked allot 'How do you make a living from photography'.

I have to be honest and say that for the first ten years of being an amateur photographer i had no idea how to make a living from photography. I remember going to business link to see if they could help. I was told that photography businesses had such a poor reputation 'for success' that they could offer no funding. I have never been one for giving up and so i read an article by an American photographer called Gary Fong and that changed everything. I decided to set up a wedding photography business and have never looked back. The best advice i can give anyone who would like to set up a photography business is look towards the USA and be positive.

Buying Your First Digital SLR

When people attend our workshops the first thing they want to know is what gear is the best and what to buy. This may sound strange but i personal think you could go into a camera shop now close your eyes -point at the wall of cameras and pick any camera and it would be good. Technology has made 'so called amateur cameras' as good as most professional cameras. Could a photograph a wedding with a budget SLR?? Yes.

Example Canon 350 D = £250

                 Canon 50mm 1.8 = £75

                 Canon 75-300 = £80

                 Canon 28mm 2.8 = £90

                 Total £495.00

The canon 350D is an 8 megapixel camera that is useable upto ISO 800. The canon 50mm 1.8 is a great lens on the cropped sensor 350D and is very sharp at f2. The 75-300 i used for years and is a brilliant lens. The 28mm 2.8 i still use today as it has very little distortion and is easy to use. You do not have to spend a fortune to produce great work.

Canon G10 - Landscapes The Lens

The lens is great to the zoom is about 28-140mm (35mm equiv). The quality of this little camera is amazing me.

Canon G10 - Landscapes

I have been using the canon g10 this week and have been very impressed with this little camera. I have used it as ISO 80 in manual mode to produce a series of landscape images. The quality and tonal range from this small sensor at ISO 80 is superb. To be able to carry a 14.7 mp sensor with full manual control wherever you like without the weight of a digital SLR is great. I would be happy to print the files at A2 size and this little camera has now become my landscape camera.

The 5D MkII - Final Thoughts

I have now been using the 5D Mkii for weddings and general use for four months now and i thought i would let you know what i think finally.

Would i spend £2000 on the camera.?

Ans. No i would buy a 5D for £850 second hand instead.

Is the colour and white balance good for people photography?

Ans. Not as good as the 5D, the skin tones are to cool and lightroom does not like the files

at all. The white balance is weird as are the colours. I like a camera where you do not have to fiddle with images in photoshop to get them right. That camera is the 5D mk1

Do you think the 21mp sensor is the best thing since sliced bread?

The files are to big, and lightroom is having trouble rendering them quickly. I now use the

smaller RAW setting which is 10mp which helps the camera for continuous shooting and lightroom / hard drive space. I shot a wedding recently at 21mp setting and the wedding raw files took up 45 GIG of space. What a waist of time this sensor is for the average wedding photography business. 

Do you ever think you will ever get over the disappointment of spending £2000 on the 5D Mk2?

Yes i have because i have found something it is very good for ( not weddings). Landscape and 

stock photography and commercial photography. I have teamed it up with the Canon 70-200 2.8 L lens and have found what it can really do. I use live view with the camera on a tripod with the full 21mp RAW files. I work mainly in black and white for landscapes and so i can select this and make the screen images black and white. I have been away from the landscape for a few years now and this combination has given me the push to make large landscape prints again.

And so you have been telling us all you do not like it for a while now and now you do make you mind up.

I am reading other reports on the camera and they seem to think the same as me. The camera as been over hyped you can not even get a battery for them from jessops at the moment as they are limited. The battery grips are all on back order.....I COULD GO ON ON ON the auto focus has problems AND ON AND ON. but it is like and old view camera to me now. Very high resolution, good to use with the image in live view.

Canon 5D Mk2 Stills at 6400 ISO - Wedding

As you can tell from my last post i was not that impressed with the 5D MK2 FOR VIDEO/STILLS at weddings. I will be posting the full video/stills fusion we did in a couple of weeks. Luckily for me Sharon made a great job of the video with the Sony camcorder and i concentrated on what i love PHOTOGRAPHY. I was able test the camera at ISO 6400 at F 2.8 with the 70-200 lens at the reception. I have mentioned in previous posts that i was not that amazed by the noise level at ISO 6400 and expected it to be better after all the hype from canon and certain photographers (who get paid by canon). As i thought the images were noisy but still useable at 7x5 print size. This is fine for the wedding album but you always have the problem of capturing a great image of someone and a relative wanting a 20x16 inch print on the wall. I am going to stick to the rule of ISO 3200 is the maximum for the 5D Mk11 and ISO 1600 is the maximum for the 5D. I have to say this is personal taste and with noise reduction software i can see allot of people having no problem with the camera at high ISO 's. Just to let you know the video mode at ISO 3200 is very poor and i would suggest a maximum of ISO 1600 in video mode for the 5D Mk2.

First Wedding With the Canon 5D Mk 2

Had a chance to use the new 5D Mk2 at a real wedding the other day and thought i would share a few thoughts with you. We decided to combine video with stills and i used the 5d mk2 and Sharon used a sony hd camcorder. The first thing i noticed was how hard it is to combine stills and video at the same time because you have to concentrate very hard with documentary/reportage wedding photography to capture the right moment. I found it almost impossible to do both things at once. We set up the 5D mk2 on a tripod at the back of the ceremony room which was quite dark. Sharon set her HD camcorder up at the front of the room to capture the vows / exchanging of the rings ect. I used the Canon 70-200 2.8 is lens and video mode on the 5D Mk2 to combine video and stills through the ceremony. I found it worked quite well as long as i manually focussed the lens and locked the exposure with the * button. I used the live view and iso 3200 / f2.8. It was then time for the signing of the register and i decided to stay at the back and capture natural images of the bride and groom. I found this a problem as the camera would only take a few images in a row before locking up and stopping the video recording. I was in the largest RAW mode and i don't think the camera / processor/ compact flash card could handle it. I had also set the white balance to auto as i always correct later on in lightroom. The problem with this is the video mode is a bit like shooting jpeg andso you can not colour correct the video easily later on. As you can tell i was not that impressed so far and decided to stop video at the end of the ceremony and let sharon use her Sony camcorder for all the footage from the ceremony on.

Click Here for another website about the pitfalls of Canon 5D Mk2 Video

Canon eos 5D MkII The New Screen

The new screen is great and a pleasure to use. The live view is also very good and the movie mode is very easy to use. My favourite new feature is the ability to change shutter speed, aperture, iso ect on the rear screen using the joystick to move around. This is great for tripod work with the camera at eye level. You can use live view mode as well and have a silent shutter which is very good. I think who ever designed the new camera is a 'real photographer' because when you start using the new 5D Mk 11 you wonder how you lived with out it. I will be trying a new way of working in church ceremonies from now on. I will be able to record short clips of HD video and take photographs at the same time with a very quiet camera. I can have the camera at eye level and adjust everything on the rear screen. The exposure is simulated very well on the screen as well. I think this is a massive improvement over the 5D for a wedding photographer.

more later

rb

Canon eos 5D MkII Noise at 3200

The main reason i have bought the new 5D Mk11 and not another 5D is i would like to be able to use IS0 6400 in dark churches with my 24-105 f4. I do not like changing lenses to much during weddings as you miss images. I have been testing the new 5D against the old 5D to see what noise is present and how bad it gets. I have not published the results as it is early days for the camera and i would like to show you the results from a wedding i will photograph at the end of january.

I have found that the old 5D was as good as i have always thought and the new 5D Mk11 is pretty much the same in terms of noise BUT............this will suprise you......the old 5D is a better type of noise that does not effect your images. I know this may be a shock to some people but i have processed the images through lightroom with the same settings on the same compact flash cards with the same 70-200 f2.8 lens set at 135mm. I can't beleive it but the ISO 6400 raw files are very noisy and i think un useable for my work........shock horror.

The reason i am shocked is because there has been allot of hype about this camera and i expected the results at ISO 6400 to be like the ISO 1600 on the old 5D. Everyone seems to talk about a 2 stop improvement over the old 5D but its not true. The only time i could use ISO 6400 is with black and white images. At 3200 the two cameras are the same and you would have allot of trouble telling the cameras apart.

rb

Canon eos 5D MkII Has Arrived

I have been lucky enough to get the new 5d Mk11 this week from just canon. I am going to be running a few posts about the new camera. I have always used the 5D for digital photography and it was the only camera that converted me from film to digital. It is going to be very hard for the new 5D mk 2 to beet it but here goes lets see if it is as good as every one likes to think.

I opened the box and picked up the new body and thought i had been sent a beta version because the top of the camera has had a new paint job. Its sort of like matt paint and looks a bit like plastic. Everyone is saying the new body feels just like the old one but if you look at every part you will see it is a brand new design and everything about this camera is different.

The screen on the top plate is bigger the main screen is bigger and much better. The viewfinder is brighter and better. All the buttons are in new positions (very annoying canon). The menu system is more like the 40D. The battery is a new type that will not fit the old 5D. Andso the main thing i would say about the camera is its all new and different.