Tutorials »

Why you need to have your camera cleaned… professionally

May 142013

On advice of a colleague pro photographer I had my camera’s cleaned by Chipclean, a Dutch company run by a former Philips chip-division specialist. I’ve been cleaning my own camera’s for years but have never totally happy with the results. I managed to get everything clean up to f13 level but never really, properly clean.

Especially in underwater (macro) photography that f13 bar is problematic so I figured it was time to have it done properly and at €45 per camera (bulk, normally it’s €55) really money well spent. So, in go my old 5D2 (dirty as hell), 5D3 (acceptable) and my 1Dx (surprisingly dirty).

Posted here is my 1Dx, before and after… how is that for a result. No way on earth you are able to get it clean yourself that good. Photo is at f22 and exaggerated by auto-levelling, in normal view there’s not a spot to be seen, except for the hot pixel that I have to have mapped out next month.

Some good advice also came with this spring-cleaning; these are good things to know!
- First, most dirt is actually from you lens caps! They get a little scraping every time you put them on or off. So , besides those, one thing to keep really clean is the (metal) lens mount!
- Secondly, don’t clean it unless you know what you’re doing. Any indoor place is basically one huge dust nest. Mostly you’ll be just moving dust around which will rapidly gather back onto your chip. If you are going to it yourselves anyway: don’t use compressed air cans and don’t use wet cleaning solutions.
- Finally: do NOT use dust rockets, especially indoors!!!!! They are the worst and will only blow a huge amount of dust into all corners of your camera.

My advice, don’t save your money and look for a company that can get you results like these (you actually get warranty on the cleaning!!!!). I’ll be doing this twice a year at least, I’m dirty!

Photoshoot: Challenger MT765D “Field Viper” (Year of the Snake)

Extreme, Tutorials 1 Response »

Feb 212013

Subject: Challenger MT765D “Field Viper” (Year of the Snake)
Client: AGCO Corporation
Usage: handout poster for the SIMA 2013 tradeshow in Paris.

For this photo the following equipment was used:
Canon 5D MK III (more MP than my Canon EOS 1DX, handy since this image is for a poster).
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM Lens mounted on a tripod
Double daylight construction lights, behind the Viper to light the smoke.
Two small halogen construction lights, under the Viper.
Two remote controlled Canon Speedlite 580 EX IIstrobes on manual setting.

And a smoke-machine….

Overview of the shooting area, not easy getting rid of the background!

Tripods are essential for this kind of work!

This was an indoor on-location shoot, which made it hard to compensate for the white walls. Therefore we started out with shooting it a normal light conditions (1/8 sec.) but with the smoke machine working (handled by Kevin).

Afterwards we shot series of the machine with smoke and proper strobe exposure. However, enough underexposure was available to make the background dark enough to be mostly invisible.

Four partial pieces of smoke were taken from these shots and added to the original image. Problem was we couldn’t produce smoke fast enough to get it as we wanted it to. Since the camera was mounted on a tripod it was easy to copy-paste these partials. By combining images it came out as I had imagined while still looking natural. This is the almost finalized image, in this version you can still see a few bits of background if you look carefully.

Just the size of this thing is enormous (and this is the smallest version)!

The tiny model and the real thing, amazing stuff!

Kevin “painting” the smoke layers.

The other final image (outdoor obviously).

Boys….

Follow my work on Twitter or Facebook! Or check my most interesting shots at Flickriver.

Simple tip: how to delete old tweets

Tutorials No Responses »

Jan 052011

I wanted to clean up my twitter account but found it hard to delete old tweets. With a bit of fooling around the solution turned out to be super simple!

Go to Snapbird.org, a little online tool that allows you to search all your old tweets. With this finding the tweets to delete is simple (using the excellent search funtion). Under each of the tweets listed you’ll find a date- and time stamp, click on it and it will lead you straight to that specific tweet in Twitter. Press delete and voila!

Hope this helps! It is a lot easier that the incredibly complicated solution presented at the Yahoo website. When you’re done, hope you have fun browsing my site for some cool photos.