the ginkgo blog

Photography holidays and courses on the Greek island of Kefalonia with Ginkgo Studios starting October 2009 through until May 2010 - Come and have fun and get some winter sun...

Full details yet to be finalised, but I am very proud to announce that from the end of October this year through until the early part of May, I/we here at Ginkgo Studios will be hosting a series of fully staffed 1 and 2 week photography holidays/courses on the simply stunning Greek Island of Kefalonia, with 6 luxury villas at our disposal.

This picture was taken last week (second week of August 2009) - Very nice boat!

I won't go in to details now as they have still to be finalised and signed off. But, here are just a few glimpses at what we will be making available for you to choose from on this island of paradise...

1 & 2 Week Holiday

• Practising professional photographer at your disposal 24/7
• Shooting and processing techniques with Apple Mac & Windows based systems available for use and for evening tutorials.
• Guided shoots from the people in the know
• Traditional Greek cuisine at tavernas reserved just for you and us
• Shared or exclusive luxury villas
• Guided walks - including secret waterfalls and lakes even the locals don't know about (so secret you will be blindfolded for part of the journey there!)
• Six berth cruiser for touring the island coast and the paradise beaches only accessible from the sea
• Plus a huge amount more

2 Week Holiday only (not mandatory)

• 1 day photography tour of Athens
• Ionian coastal trip taking in from a choice of Olympia, Delphi, the Corinth Canal....
• Ferry crossing to the island of Kefalonia

Like I say - This is just a small selection of what we will be making available as they are all signed off - The rest will blow you away too. So if you are interested, drop me a line, subscribe or bookmark us and check back regularly over the next few weeks for mare details, dates and of course, prices...

We are planning to make this one of the best, if not the best photography holiday / course available. So if you are interested and have you're own ideas that you think we haven't covered, be sure to let us know!

We are looking for guest writers for our blog - Interested?

Those of you who know us here at Ginkgo, will know that we are as much about sharing as we are about business when it comes to photography.

  

  

But obviously there is a limit to our knowledge and our areas of speciality. Plus, there are undoubtedly other professionals in our industry out there who are better than us at certain parts of our discipline. We would have to be delusional to think otherwise. Plus there are experienced individuals in complimentary fields who will hold gems of information that our readers (and probably us too) will find invaluable at some point in the amateur or professional careers.

Therefore, we would like to invite you to share your knowledge and experience with our growing reader base, whoever you are and whatever you do. If you feel that you have something of value to share with our readers who are primarily amateur and professional photographers - Get in touch, send us some links of your work or an article - and let’s go from there.

The more useful information we can get out there and link points of interest together, the better it will be for all of us.

Here are some examples of peeps that we would really love to see articles from here on our blog. This is not a definitive list, just a few examples. So whoever you are and whatever you do; if you feel you have something of value to share - don’t hold back - get in touch...

1. Web Designers & SEO’s - We all need to know more about this and in terms we with little brains can understand
2. Copy writers - Copy is the completion of the image in the creative industry. Whether for marketing or advertising or your promotional materials. 
3. Marketing - Viral marketing - What is it, how does it work, should be looking at it? Traditional marketing :  What’s important, what’s not?
4. Finance - No matter how good you are - If you screw this side of your business, you are going to get hurt - What are the best and most important things to take care of? And how?
5. Editors - What do you want form a photographer? How do you want to receive it? How should we be approaching you? How shouldn’t we be approaching you?
6. Models - How to get the best out of a session? - Your relationships with your subjects and how they will impact your results - Do’s and don’ts

And the list could go on and on and on...

What’s in it for you? Simple... Exposure. And, the right kind of exposure, to the right kind of peeps. And of course, the sense of self satisfaction that you have probably helped others in some way and at pretty much any time in the future. Oh the power of Google.

OK, you get the idea. So enough said. If you’re interested, drop us a line. If you’re not, then sign up to the News Feed or eMail subscription and see what develops.

Free studio based, portrait & studio lighting course every quarter of 2009 and our Christmas present to 5 individuals on the 20th December 2008...

On 20 December 2008, and then each quarter in 2009, we will be offering a free one day studio based, portrait photography course. With a focus on the use of light, both natural & artificial with a guest subject / model.

  

  

Each of these one-day sessions will have spaces for five individuals to join us at our Hampshire-based studios, where you will have available to you, between two and three professional photographers, with specialist knowledge in studio and location-based portrait lighting. And, we will even have a guest model attend. There is even an outside chance we may even provide coffee too.

There will be no pre-requisites with regards to skill level. But it will also not be on a first come first served basis.

Interested - Of course you are - click to read on and get involved...

101 Photoshop tips & tricks - The 'Rap'...

There’s a guy called Deke McClelland who is shall we say - a little eccentric. But ‘good’ eccentric and has produced a rap video featuring 101 Photoshop tips and tricks in 5 minutes. A little on the mad side, but big on the useful side.

There is a heap of stuff in this rap I never knew and probably would never have bothered looking up, because I just wouldn’t have thought of the function. Plus there is the stuff I’m pretty sure I once knew but had been lost in the mists of time.

Plus some guys over at an outfit called CreativeTechs have transcribed the rap for you - So you can print it and sing along. Come-on... You know you want to!

Deke’s blog is here... Well worth a look and a return visit.

Canon 1D Mkiii written off by a sensor clean - Not a happy bunny!

For those of you that own, or are considering purchasing a Canon 1D Mkiii, based on our recent experiences here at Ginkgo Studios, here’s a little heads up for you.

Just prior to a rather important shoot a short while ago, we decided to give the Mkiii a bit of a clean and this included the sensor, as sadly the integrated sensor cleaner doesn’t really seem to do much. It wasn’t really dirty, but it wasn’t really clean and this was a reall important shoot.

To cut a very long story (which I may go into another time) very short. The sensor cleaning swab managed to scratch the low pass filter over the sensor. Obviously with a very important shoot the following morning, this raised the heart rate and blood pressure a little.

Given that the repair cost quoted before sending off to Canon was in the region of £300 ($600) based on the experiences from Mkii repairs and that it was likely to be away for to five weeks, it made sense to just buy a new body and offset it with the insurance company against the rental of that period. Thus having a second body as we took a hit on the overall cost.

However, on inspection by Canon, they changed the quoted price to just over £1000 ($2000) due to the way that the low pass filter was now built into the camera body.

It would appear, that the low pass filter is permanently bonded to the sensor housing, which is in turn is permanently bonded to the circuit board containing the processing chips. At the least, this is what they have told me. I.e. pretty much everything that does the hard work inside needed replacing because of a slightly scratch piece of glass.

So effectively, for a professional who will most likely require a replacement body as a rental for the repair period, it’s pretty much a guarantee that the insurance company will write off the camera. And for the non-professional it will just be a dammed expensive repair job / insurance payout and being without a camera for a month or two.

Given that the low pass filters primary job is to protect extremely delicate sensor and has always been a totally replaceable part because of this function. It seems to me absolutely unbelievable that the construction has been changed in this manner.

However, the purpose of this post is not from me to have a rant and rave but to simply share our experience, our costs and a recommendation that no matter how expensive your sensor cleaning kit is, you might well want to think twice about doing it yourself, no matter how experienced you are at sensor cleaning.

It may well be that something with the hardness of diamond happened to be floating around in our obsessively clean studio and fell in onto the sensor during the 30 seconds that the shutter was up. Or, it may well have been a poorly constructed sensor swab using a glue that will put the epoxy to shame; or it may be that the low pass filter is constructed from some form of transparent cheese. To be honest, it could have been anything - The damage is done, so for us at least it’s all a little academic. I have my personal opinion as to the cause, but it is simply that, a personal opinion.

So from the sake of £40 ($80) for someone else to clean your sensor and in turn take the responsibility and liability should anything go wrong. It may actually be a small price to pay.

Simulated Grey Graduation and ND Filter effect...

This tutorial for Photoshop CS3 uses the Soft Light layer and brush tools to replicate having a grey graduation and a ND filter slapped on the front of your lens.
The amount of times I have been out and seen a scene that cried out for a little creative glass and all I had with me was a point and click or one of the other cameras with no filters available.
Now I have found soft Light in CS3, that may no longer be an issue. This is just one of the seemingly many tricks you can create with Soft Light in Photoshop and the first in a line of tutorials we will be creating blessing the hallowed ground that Soft Light has passed on.

As always, comments appreciated.

Something to remember when using the Soft Light brush - Don’t forget to put it back to normal as it will do your head in when you go to use the brush days later and nothing seems to be happening.

Using the WFT-E2 under OS X Leopard (Mac)…

OK - So having bought Canons WFT-E2 some months ago, I have only ever, until recently had the damn thing working once. Having found no rhyme or reason as why it wouldn’t work for me I was pretty close to just slapping the thing on eBay and having done with it. That was after sense kicked in and I put the hammer back in the toolbox.

And then the answer came to me… And now I love the little wireless gift from god! And no longer do the letters WFT appear to be in the wrong order…

Recently by the way, equals last week (so not worked for about 5 months).

I’m gonna share this information as I could not find anything out there explaining why I may be having a problem. So if you too are about to simply stamp very hard on one very expensive piece of hardware - read on and hopefully you too can enter the world of smug and halt that tearing sound as your hair is pulled from the roots in your skull.

The clue to the problem lies in the title of this piece, namely the Leopard bit. The one time I had it working was under Tiger just before I upgraded. You won’t find the technical reasoning as to why it doesn’t work under Leopard properly in this article as I have no idea, but if you can get it to work as you would want it to, who cares!?

The answer to entering the world of smug lies in using FTP to connect and transfer your files. Whatever that PTP (PC) is supposed to do, trust me when I say there isn’t a hope in hell that it will under Leopard. So forget about wanting to remote control wirelessly (just use a USB cable for that). FTP is the future for happiness with this little puppy.

So how?!

First of all you will need to allow sharing via FTP on the machine(s) you want to hook up to. This is done via the System Preferences panel and then Sharing. Select File Sharing and tick if not already. Make sure that your account has Read & Write access (usually default). Click the Options button at the bottom right and a sub-panel drops down.

Make sure that both Share file and folders using AFP (usually activated by default and needed if you want to browse the files from other machines on the network), plus Share files and folders using FTP. Click Done and your… well, done. Ignore the FTP access instructions it gives you. Use afp:// instead of ftp://

For the sake of example, create a folder in ‘your accounts’ Pictures folder and call it Wireless.

Now, what I have done is saved ‘Set 1’ named ‘Studio’ on the camera for shooting on the Studio network and ‘Set 2’ named ‘Laptop’ for shooting out in the field with the MacBook Pro - i.e. no network available.

To make your life easier on your LAN, set the DHCP settings on your machine to DHCP (with manual address) and choose an IP address to suit your set up. This just means that you can guarantee that your IP will remain the same and not get taken by another machine. If you Create a Network, then I’m afraid you’ll have to check each time you do a shoot and adjust accordingly (If that changes I’ll update this - If you know otherwise, please share).

On your machine connected to your LAN or created network, select About this Mac, More Info… and then the Network tab to see what your IP is for your machine (you may have to check this each time you create a new network as it does change). Make a note of this IP.

As far as your machine is done, that is it.

Now to the WFT-E2…

In the MkIII menu, go to the tab with the WFT-E2 settings (third yellow tab) and when your in the first thing you need to do is to change Communication Mode to FTP and just forget that the PTP (PC) option has ever existed - I only wish I could!

Now go to the Set up option and choose LAN Settings. Select a Set (We’ll use Set 1 because it’s there). First off I’d recommend you change the Settings name so it’s friendly and recognisable. In this case I’ll use Studio. Then Choose Change… Set the LAN type to Wireless, then go to TCP/IP and change IP address set. to Manual Setting. Put your IP address to the same as the one you noted on your machine except increase the last value by 1. So 169.243.20.57 for machine becomes 169.243.20.58 for your camera. Leave the rest of their settings at their default values and return to the previous menu.

Choose FTP Server and select the Address. This does need to be the same as your machine. So in our case 169.243.20.57 and then just leave the port number at the default 21 unless you have set something else up on your machine previously. Return to the previous menu.

Select Log in password and then Log in name… This needs to be the same as your user account log in on your machine as does the password when you go to enter that. Then return to the previous menu.

Choose Target Folder and enter /Pictures/Wireless (at least for this example). Return to previous menu. Leave the remainder of these at their defaults for now - you can tweak and mess things up after you have got it all working ;-) And return to the previous menu.

Now select Wireless LAN, then SSID. Here you need to enter the SSID of your network or the SSID of the network you created form your machine. Return.

Next select Advanced settings… Under 1 choose Infrastructure if you are on a LAN and Ad hoc 11b/g if you are on a network that you created from your machine. If you are reading this then I am guessing it’s pretty safe to assume you have invested in the architecture to support the 11g - If you have I probably don’t need to recommend you choose this because it’s a hell of a lot faster. So I won’t…

Setting 2 is the wireless channel - I have mine on 11, but that’s because of our and surrounding wireless networks. Generally I’d advise to leave it on Auto.

Setting 3 is the encryption - I leave mine off as my machines and networks are encrypted and I’m not sufficiently paranoid enough to worry about it for my pictures. If you are sufficiently paranoid, feel free to add this after you have got it working without it - Trust me WEP is another way of saying ‘a potential whole lotta pain’. But the choice is yours.

So, that’s almost it… If you return to the LAN settings and first save your settings and then turn Protect settings On. It’ll save you having to repeat the whole process next time you attach the WFT.

Now return to the main menu and if you are like me and want the files streaming to be processed as you shoot, set Automatic transfer to Enable.

Something else you can do, under the Transfer type/size is if you have multiple captures set i.e. RAW and small jpeg, you can send only the small jpeg to your machine for instant viewing as the file size is so small. Excellent for previewing during a studio shoot. Also, if you are using Lightroom or Aperture, you can have the folders watch, auto import and apply effects and settings in real time. So if you have already set up your post processing before hand as we do, you can see how they are going to come out on the small files as you shoot in pretty much real time - cool huh!?

OK - We are done! All you need to do now is to go to the Pictures/Wireless folder, fire off a shot and wait for the images to come in. Just so you don’t flip out the first time you try this. A new folder called ‘A’ will appear and inside that will be a folder called ‘DCIM’ and inside that will be a folder called (probably) ‘100EOS1D’ and inside that will be the pictures! I can only guess a windows guy wrote all this stuff - Including that bloody PTP (PC)!

If you want to watch a folder - the last folder (100EOS1D) is the one you will need to have the software watching. We have our software move rather than copy it as that way it is always clean after a shoot ready for the next.

One last thing to repeat is that if you are working outside of a LAN, be it yours or one you are using on location and want to use this technique by creating your own network on you Mac laptop (which you can do in the middle of a desert if you really want to), you not only need to create a new network (use the airport drop down menu at the top of your screen), but you need to make sure that the SSID, the laptops IP, the FTP IP (the laptops IP) and the cameras IP are correct. To date this seems to change each time I do it. I’m positive that there is a way to keep it standard - but as yet I don’t know what it is.

[UPDATE - 5th March 2009] - It's actually really easy and sorry I haven't already added the info. I know a lot of people read this article. In your System Preferences > Network and create a 'Location' - In that 'Location, pre-set the IP etc. and whenever you create your own network for the WFT to hook up to, simply choose the pre-set that you have created with all the correct IP information. As simple as that. [/UPDATE - 5th March 2009]

OK - That’s it… That should work, if it doesn’t and you want to ask a question/share settings, comments etc. If you post it as a reply here I’ll respond and hopefully it may answer others questions too.

Hopefully this was of use to you…