Author Archives: bridge

About bridge

I am a digital designer and photographer who also loves experimenting, building, and learning something new.

Cleaning your DSLR Sensor on Vimeo

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Cleaning your DSLR Sensor from Bud Thorpe on Vimeo.

Here’s a great tutorial on how to clean your camera right. If you take your time, you can safely and effectively dry and wet clean your sensor. I’ve been using a kit from Copperhill Images that included PecPads and Eclipse for several years now with good results. I got their sensor brush as well, but found it was too easy to accidentally smear lubricant or other contaminants that may be in the chamber across the sensor. It sometimes forced me to wet clean when I only wanted to do light dusting, so I stopped using it. Instead, I’ve found that using a blower to blow dust out of the mirror box and directly off the sensor regularly is easier and just about as effective as a sensor brush between wet cleanings. Blowers are also great for cleaning dust of the front and back of lenses and any other equipment where dust gets stuck in hard to reach grooves.

A trip to Vietnam

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In May of last year, my wife and I had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam to visit our friends Lance and Kristen who had been living in Đà Nẵng for about 2 years teaching English and working for Orphan Voice. It was an amazing experience and having friends who lived there allowed us to get immersed in Vietnamese food, culture and traffic very quickly. We spent most of our time in Đà Nẵng, but also explored Hội An, Huế, and surrounding areas. If you ever get a chance to go to Vietnam, be sure you motorbike over the Hải Vân Pass. It really is as awesome as Top Gear says in their Vietnam Special. It was an experience we will never forget, and we were lucky to share it with good friends.


Experimenting with a new one light setup and retouch

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I often find myself wandering an assortment of photography blogs online and watching tutorials from other photographers. I recently ran across this tutorial on iso1200.com about a one light portrait setup: Sean Armenta | One Light Beauty Setup.

Single light setups are not new to me, but I just recently picked up a new 24″ softbox to use with a SB-800 for portable lighting and hadn’t really tried it out yet. I don’t have a big beauty dish like Sean uses in the tutorial, but I thought this would be a great opportunity to try out my small softbox using the same one light principles he talks about in this tutorial and see if I could create similar beauty lighting. So, as usual, I ask my lovely life to be my model and start setting up.

The setup is quite simple. Basically just a softbox and a reflector. Take a look at the diagram to the left. I didn’t use a mirror like Sean did simply because I didn’t have one lying around, but I don’t think it would have made much difference in my setup anyway.

I placed my softbox about an arms length away from the face at approximately a 45 degree angle. It needs to be high enough to shoot under, but not so high that you loose the nice modeling on the face and neck. The reflector just lays flat in front of the subject to reflect light up under the chin and neck and fills in the hard shadows created by a single light from above.

After I watched this tutorial, I noticed Sean had another tutorial that took the same portrait and walked through his process for a beauty retouch. I figured that I might as well try his retouching methods as well and see what I can learn. He used plugins and software that I do not have, so my retouching was done in Lightroom and Photoshop only.

I started by zeroing out the image to create a neutral picture in Lightroom. Since I’d be flattening the raw into a PSD, making sure there are no extreme whites and blacks and a nice tone curve in Lightroom is essential for editing in Photoshop. I next went through removing blemishes and smoothing any troublesome lines or marks. The tips in the retouching tutorial are great for keeping a natural skin look. No porcelain skin here.

I won’t walk through all the steps here since you should go watch the tutorial yourself. I do want to mention that his method of using long, angled oval brushes was new to me, but completely makes sense. It’s very useful in tight places to retain texture and avoid foreign influences when using the heal tool. I definitely recommend both of these tutorials if you are new to single light setups or retouching.

The Result

For my example, I tried to stay as close to the methods presented in these tutorials as I could, but I did apply some of my own additional editing techniques as I saw fit since I don’t have the plugins Sean used. I’m happy with it! This one light setup is simple to do, but gives very nice results for portraits like this. I’m definitely happy with the new 24 inch soft box I used. While it doesn’t look exactly like the beauty dish light, it does single light portraits quite well and is very portable. I think I’ll be using it a lot in the future.

Equipment Used:

Bulk Continuous Ink System for Artisan Series Printers

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If you are like me, buying printer ink is one of those moments in time that elicit extreme dread. Ink always runs out at the worst time and the thought of spending anywhere between $50-100 just to print out a buy-one-get-one free coupon for dinner seems to defeat the purpose. I print everything non-essential in draft mode in an attempt to save ink and rarely print out photos, yet the ink seems to run out faster than a carton of ice cream.

My disdain for printer ink intensified lately as I learned that some ink cartridges don’t calculate the ink left based on actual volume, but instead base it on a counter. This means that an “empty” cartridge may actually still have ink left. Unless I get a cartridge chip resetter, I’m forced to toss out whatever ink is left because my printer refuses to even print pure black ink if it’s out of light cyan. I realize printer companies do this as “protection” for the printer, but I’m not totally satisfied with that answer.

As I was searching to find a deal on ink, I ran across this continuous ink system for about the same price as the 6 cartridges for my Epson Artisan 700. The CIS boasted 15 times the amount of ink of a standard cartridge using external tanks that look quite impressive. I’ve had 2 printers in the past get destroyed by off-brand ink, so I’ve felt trapped into buying brand name ink out of fear. However, I was willing to try it out after reading good reviews. I am seriously glad I did.

Besides the ink guzzling and a few other quirks, I’ve been pretty happy with my Artisan 700 printer, but it was not happy with me that I forced it to consume continuous ink. After unpacking the ink system and marveling at the quantity of ink before my eyes, I quickly pulled the empty cartridges and began the install. The broken English instructions were pretty straight forward, but upon turning on my printer it gave me a unspecified error and would not function at all. Needless to say, I felt quite disappointed.

I pulled the cartridge pack out and reseated it over and over again with no luck. I wondered if maybe there was some sort of pressure issue since there were some bubbles in the lines. The kit came with a syringe to draw ink through the lines, so I started sucking ink out the bottom of the cartridges and squirting it back into the external tanks until all the air was gone. Still no luck. I searched for how-to videos and tried anything and everything I could think of with no luck. After a few hours of googling and frustration, I decided to put the old cartridges back in to see if it would give the same error. Sure enough it did and I realized it was my printer having problems and not the new ink.

After contemplating throwing my printer out the window, for some reason I decided to just turn it off, and then pull the plug while it was starting up in order to have a look at the print head. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I plugged it back in and suddenly it just started working. Why? I have no idea. Maybe the printer realized that a CIS meant it would be doing a lot more work in the future, and it did not want to change from it’s previously lethargic lifestyle. Pulling the plug and examining the print head just made it realize I meant business!

I’ve been using the continuous ink system now for a couple weeks. With refills around $30 for all ink colors, I no longer feel like printing a photo at home is flushing money down the toilet. After a number of photo prints and pages that would have burdened a standard ink cartage to near empty status, the tanks don’t look like they’ve drained at all. I don’t think I’ll be buying ink for a very long time.

As for quality of the ink, I don’t have any scientific data. However, I have not seen any change in color or clarity from the standard Epson inks. The fact that the ink I got on my fingers while using the syringe didn’t come off for about a week and a half makes me feel like prints should remain durable and lasting for home printing needs.

I wish I would have discovered a continuous ink system long ago. It will certainly save a lot of money over time. My installation issues seemed to be an isolated incident since I could not find anyone else online who had the same problem. I recommend this system to anyone with basic home office printing needs. Find a continuous ink system that fits your printer, drop it in, and forget about buying ink for a long time.

Opteka OSC-18 1/8″ Speed Grid

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Looking to add some affordable light modifiers to my kit, I came across this 1/8″ honeycomb grid from Opteka that attaches directly to any speedlight. It was cheaper than other products like it so I put it in my Amazon cart to give it a try.

Build quality is good, especially considering the low price. I think it will stand up to normal camera bag abuse just fine. I do think it is a little bigger than it needs to be, but that is because it’s designed for a universal fit. I’m using it on a Nikon SB-800 and there is plenty of room to be used on a larger flash.

My only real complaint with this grid is the way it mounts to the flash. It comes with a velcro strap that you are supposed to first wrap around the head of the flash unit as a mounting point for two additional velcro straps that attach to the side of the grid itself. In this configuration, the slightly heavy grid is not held very firmly to the flash and can flop around while moving it. However, there are some simple solutions to this problem. One of my speedlights has some velcro tape on it from another light modifier and I found that if I attach the two small velcro straps to the velcro already on my flash first, and then wrap the included velcro strap around it, it’s held firmly. It really just needs a little extra tension around the outside of the velcro straps to hold it tight to the top of the flash. This also could be accomplished by a rubber band or just another velcro strap.

With cheaper accessories from companies such as Opteka, there may be some give and take in convenience. But the important part is how well this thing actually works, and it works pretty well. As you can see from this image, it creates a near perfect circle of light with nice edge falloff. Mounted properly there is no light spill around the sides of the flash. It works exactly like it should.

For my purposes, the mounting and size issues are not a problem. Realistically, I will only use this grid occasionally, which is part of the reason I did not want to spend a lot for one. It’s a great accessory to have on hand for when you need light controlled in this way. There is a 1/4″ version available as well that will give a slightly broader circle of light. For $13 you really can’t go wrong with this one.

Example images coming soon