Timothy Armes' blog

Photography as I experience it…

Archive for March, 2009

Photographic equipment and air travel

Friday, March 27th, 2009

This post is just a chance for me to rant about the current state of air travel restrictions.  See,  I need to take a certain amount of useful camera gear on a plane with me, including the following:

  • Canon 5D MkII
  • Canon 30D (backup body)
  • EF 16-35mm
  • EF 24-70mm
  • EF 70-200m
  • Macbook Pro (15″)
  • All the various chargers, cables, card readers, etc.

That’s a fairly compact amount of kit, but it’s worth a bomb.  The absolute last thing that I want to do is check-in any of this equipment as luggage. Doing so would mean risking loss, theft or breakage, any of which would not only be extremely upsetting in its own right, but it would stop me from participating actively during the week.

So imagine if you will my chagrin when I read the carry on baggage rights with Turkish Airlines:

“You are allowed to carry only one carry-on bag on board. Its dimensions must be 23x40x55 cm and must weigh max. 8kg. ”

8kg? That’s just ridiculous.

I grabbed my lightest backpack, and I can effectively stuff in the Macbook Pro, the 5D and 2 lenses before I reach the limit.  What’s a man to do?  Stick the other lens and body in my coat pockets seems to be the only possible solution to the problem.

I’d love to hear how other solve this issue….

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Posted in Gear | 17 Comments »

Canon vs Nikon flash systems

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Update January 2010: I’ve revisited this topic following my switch to Nikon, and the newer posts gives a more “concrete” comparison.

Neil Van Niekerk has just written a very interesting comparison between Canon and Nikon flash systems.  Neil’s a very experienced TTL flash user, and uses both Nikon and Canon extensively, so there’s really no better person to discuss the subject.

His conclusion is that for on camera TTL (including bounced flash) the systems are just different.  That’s all.

We often hear that Nikon’s flash system is better than Canon’s and being the curious fellow that I am I’ve tried many times in the past to get to the bottom of this question by searching the net.  Until now I’ve never seen a decent comparison – probably due to the fact that there are so few people who are intimately acquainted with both systems.

I personally use Canon’s ETTL-II flash extensively, and I’ve never had an issue with it. It’s always worked extremely well for me. Clearly understanding the system is key to getting good results in either case.

However, I was very interested to note Niel’s thoughts concerning the better ease of use of Nikon’s off-camera TTL, so I took a peek at the SB-900 manual…

Here’s my own feature comparison based purely on reading the Nikon manual, my own experience with Canon, and the things that are important to my own use of flash.
(more…)

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Posted in Gear, Lighting | 8 Comments »

A Twitter Experiment

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Since I’d like to reserve the use of this blog for “worthwhile” posts (for want of a better word) I’ve been wondering how I can best publish snippets of information such as updates to my plugins etc.

Twitter seems to be a perfect for this sort of thing, so I’m going to start twittering about the less consequential stuff.   If you’d like to follow me you can do here:

http://twitter.com/timothyarmes

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Designing the perfect still life table

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

wpid533-img-0344.jpgI’ve been asked to do a location shoot next week that requires the use of a still life table. I’ve been thinking about investing in a table like this for a while, so this was a good reason to take the opportunity.
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Posted in Gear | 5 Comments »

Vegetable landscape with jewellery

Friday, March 6th, 2009

wpid515-img-0258-edit.jpgI was recently asked to take a photo of the interesting necklace that you see in this picture. I was given a free reign to come up with anything I liked. The necklace is handmade and clearly quite fun, so I decided that I wanted a fun visual theme in the final image. I don’t know how or why the idea of using vegetables like this popped into my head, but I find the final result quite enticing. I can imagine a series of images for each piece in the range would be quite visually stimulating, and fun to do too.

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Posted in Photos, Studio | 4 Comments »