I was at Le Mans 2009 endurance car race during the official test runs of last week. I brought back a few photos (despite the considerable problem of shooting pictures under the rain).

Peugeot 908 HDI team - Pit stop (Le Mans 2009)

Peugeot 908 HDI (Le Mans 2009)

The whole gallery and the mini-site to buy posters.

If you want to fish sardines, ask advice from a pro : The sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus). This slides diaporama from National Geographic shows sailfishes grouping themselves to hunt a big school of sardines. Really beautiful and utterly technical.

Photo by Paul Nicklen

Thanks to BibliOdyssey again, we can see magnificent reproductions of XIXth Century engravings of parrots, maccaws and other Psittacidae birds.

Macrocercus ararauna - Blue and yellow maccaw

But there are also interesting modern parrots. Go and watch the videos and photos from the Perroquet project from fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Did I say impressive?

Two articles written exactly for photographers willing to improve their flash expertise. I found them on the Internet and wanted to share them with you, photo friends.

• Natural looking flash. Right! It may be very difficult to get a nice looking lighting without burning everything with lights that cry “flash”.
• White Seamless Tutorial. A 5-part article of an exceptionnal quality/expertise but perfectly understandable by anybody willing to get a good studio lighting with a limited budget to have white backgrounds as well as black ones, grey ones, colored ones, with perfect mastering of the result. Really brillant!

For sure, we can find information of the highest quality on the Internet.

What I do (or should be doing, since -like everybody else- I can’t stick to my good resolutions) in order to obtain beautifully detailled photographs. It’s even more important if you want to make them ready for printing in large size (on your brand new A3 inkjet printer or poster-size at a print shop).

A quality lens

The first advice I should give it to choose a high-end lens. Even if the trans-standard zoom lens of the kit for most digital SLR cameras provide very good results in an exceptionnally compact form factor, that we all love to use. But these are also the result of so many compromises where image quality cannot be always the only factor.

Professionnal zoom lenses (the most expensive) are often capable of really impressive achievements, but prime lenses (with a fixed focal lenght) can reach quality levels that no zoom lens can reach. Some say that this is their unique (and only) selling point: Quality.

Thus, in the Minolta-Sony lens catalog, I rushed onto the white tele-lenses from the APO G pro family that, even today, produce exceptionnally good images (for a price no less astonishing if you don’t purchase them second-hand). But each serious camera/lens manufacturer has a few very nice lenses in its catalog.

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Several times, I talked about the limitation to photo image quality by light diffraction but I failed to go into the details. To the general request of one reader who asked, I will try to give some explanations to better understand why the digital photographer must absolutely take that into account to make better pictures and to choose its camera.

The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.

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Aube-Nature.com is a web site I tend to track nearly continuously because Cédric Girard tends to write interesting posts about nature photography. But I also caught a few posts with nice images of cats This goes farther than the usual “nice companion” photos.

I recommend heartily to check regularly Aube-Nature.com.

I have been asked by some people about the price of the upcoming Sony Alpha 900 flagship digital SLR camera. The problem is that there is no information filtering down from Sony. The only thing that we can say is that there is a body of indirect evidence that points to some pretty serious competition figures.

Nikon Rumours affirmed last week that the Nikon D700 (or D700 FX) will be priced just under 3000 USD. It has been said that the Canon EOS 5D MkII should arrives around 3500 USD, but the Canon EOS 5D is already sold under 2000 USD now. And the Nikon D3 (already previous generation camera) is still near 5000 USD, except in some very small on-line shops whose reputation is a bit low.

Not taking into account the actual performance and exact features of each, I would say that Sony will be able to position itself around 2000 USD which is the price point that Canon is setting for all the others. But keep in mind that there is a large body of amateurs enthusiasts that are ready to pay much more than the usual 600-1500 USD price tag for a digital SLR, but the competition is heating to bring Full Frame capability to the masses.

Your guess is as good as mine, but I would say that the tendency is to prepare to a very low price point. 2000 USD will be considered a turning point (notice how Canon is letting the price of the EOS 5D plummet down). A camera willing to position itself as top-quality Full Frame will probably aim at $2500 (I think the price of the Canon EOS 5D MkII or a possible Canon EOS 6D could climb there, not even speaking of a possible Nikon D3x in 2009 with a stratospheric price), but a product aimed at a larger market would have to start around $2000 and preparing for a street price going under this limit (this should be the case of the Nikon D700 -the name is referring more to the D300 than to the D3/D3x pro family- and of the Sony Alpha 900).

As I am writing this article, I am in Shanghai for a profesionnal trip (my company seems to believe that I can improve some things in our manufacturing plant of Pudong, in the suburbs of this big Chinese city). As an amateur photographer, I took some time for myself to look at some photo opportunities here. Two remarks may interest you too.

Shooting in Shanghai

The most obvious observation in this gigantic city of 17 million people is that the air is full of dust. And I mean it. Everybody notice it. The city is under permanent construction (or is it “re-construction”). Zillions of trucks are moving earth around to help build sky-scrappers all over the city. This and the overall industrial pollution makes it amazingly foggy.

I wanted to shoot a few photos; Don’t even think about deep landscapes (even from the highest buildings): On the clearest day, the sky is white and the visibility is limited to a distance surprising to even my pre-informed self.

However, Shanghai is one the modern world cities where night shots are a real pleasure. There is light and contrast everywhere: Buildings with lights from top to bottom, giant ads, displays of all kinds and all sizes, ligthed boats on the Huangpu river. So much light that you may even forget your tripod if your willing to shoot at high ISOs.

Click on the thumbnails if you want to access the larger versions

Buying photo equipment in Shanghai

OK! Shanghai is less attractive than Hong Kong, but China is usually a place where you can find photo bargains. In Shanghai, the place to go -apart from the usual electronics malls found all over the city, like in Pudong (South of Shiji Avenue)- is the big photo market at Luban Lu and Xietu Lu (in Chinese, “Lu” means “road”), that I found easly thanks to Internet (it is just North of Lupu bridge and Zhongshan N° 1 Rd, in Puxi).

Click on the thumbnails if you want to access the larger versions

You will find there anything for photo and photo activities. 6 floors of small shops. Of course, you will find camera sales on 1st floor (Canon, Sony, Nikon, Pentax, Sigma, etc.). But as in many Shanghai malls, the higher you climb, the better bagains you find (until you reach a level where most offers are presented in approximate stacks and packs).

Apparently, the risk of seeing fake products is limited, but it may be very difficult to find the difference between an original product and a fake one. However, I did not find any price obviously too-low-to-be-true (a sure mark of fake products), just a lot of good bargains and some less impressive prices. Apparently, prices are a little better than most Europeans prices (even taking into account an added VAT to be paid when returning home) with nothing Earth shattering. However, you must remember that haggling is standard practice here. Some advice:

1. Know the European price of the item you want to buy (not to be taken by a bad price in the heat of the moment),
2. Know the exact Euro-Yuan conversion rate (everything is paid cash in Yuans (or RMB) which is currently about 10 yuans for 1 euro),
3. Ask for the price in simple English (”for this, how much?”),
4. The sales people will show it on the screen of a desktop calculator. You can make a counter proposal just by typing a different value on the same desktop calculator (a 5% discount seems to be standard). If the sale is possible, a frank smile will be enough and an exchange of “OK” will be clear.
5. Always keep in hand the item you’re interested in. Don’t let the sales guy go to the back of the shop (to pack it, or something). There is always the risk seeing him/her returning with a different product than the one you paid for.

People are very welcoming and even customers proposed to assist me and shopkeepers not speaking English. Many people where genuinely interested in knowing where I came from, what I wanted to find, etc.

Speaking of bargains, I saw a few things that could interest Minolta and Sony DSLR lovers like me: The last 3 floors host a large number of second-hand shops of relatively good quality. Plenty of equipment from all the brands you could expect and a few more… Examples of Minolta second hand lenses:

• Minolta Apo G 300mm/2.8 for 17,500 RMB, including the original hard box and in good condition (a fair bargain if you don’t count VAT)
• Minolta Apo G 600mm/4 for 38,000 RMB, without the original hard box, but in perfect condition (60% of normal eBay price, plus VAT. A great bargain for a several kilos of glass and metal)
• Minolta 1.4x converter for 1,800 RMB, like new (a fair price)
• Sony 2x converter for 3,200 RMB (not so great, even for a near perfect piece)

So, you can dig and find a few good things. Or you can run for the shops specializing in lighting equipment (fourth floor). Or you can look for the designer’s Leica shop on the last floor. Or you can shop around for a half-priced tripod (all brands are available plus a few good local copies).

Conclusion, for now

Shanghai is a neat place to be if you love big cities and skyscrappers. Tourism is quite pleasant there and hundreds of thousands of expatriates (and more tourists from all over the world) have made the local people really welcoming.

Click on the thumbnails if you want to access the larger versions

I don’t know why (maybe because I’m looking for them) but I seem to find plenty of posts about optimizing your photography of food. Let’s share some of the best ones here:

• First, a real collection of them in one place: Big and Tasty Food Photography Tips Roundup.
• A smaller list of them: The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips, giving a list of things to manage correctly from the beginning.
• DIY: Light Beer describes a lighting problem for shooting clear bottles of beer.

If you have a simple Point-n-Shoot digital camera, you may not know it, but you are limited more by the marketing teams than by the real technical constraints of your hardware. But if your camera is from Canon you may find an easy way out.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit is an open-source software project that can be loaded on cameras using Canon’s DIGIC II or DIGIC III processors. Interestingly, it has the following features:

• It’s free (as in free beer)
• Its installation is completely reversible (it does not remove anything, does not replace the existing firmaware, just adds new features installed on-the-fly from an SD card)
• Faster shutter speed: up to 1/60,000 of a second!
• Slower shutter speed: down to 65 seconds!
• Automatic bracketing of exposures
• RAW file format
• Live histogram display
• Battery readout
• Scripted actions
• Longer videos
• More image compression options
• Use USB for remote control
• Depth-of-Field calculator

Impressive! The list is long enough to give your food for thought and it applies to an impressive list of compatible cameras.

Sources: Wired article, CHDK source.

See them all at http://www.naturesbestphotography.com/

Jürgen Freund
OCEANS
Dwarf Minke Whale
Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef, Australia

If you want the best possible Flash memory storage for your camera, you need to look for a good Flash memory card. But which one is the best? Just look at those tests:

• Rob Galbraith’s CF/SD Performance Database (in English)
• Clubic : 40 cartes mémoire en test : la loi du plus cher ? (en Français)

And remember that the fastest memory cards are no longer needed if you are not using one of the biggest SLR cameras and in RAW mode. However, a fast memory card is still useful to get the data into Photoshop (if you have a really good flash card reader on your computer, not the first 13-in-1 USB reader on eBay).

In order to easily realize good panoramic photos, it is not enuogh to have a good software package. You also need good images to start with, or the shooting results may degrade significantly the results.

Some easy-to-follow advice:

• Start using the Auto exposure mode of your camera, then switch to Manual to shoot in these exact same conditions (of course, the ambient light must not change, so don’t wait too much and avoid times when light is changing quickly -sunset, storms, etc.).
• Use a tripod, but if there are not too many objects in the front of the subject don’t worry about computing the exxact optimcal center of the camera+lens.
• Disable the autofocus after setting the focus correctly and maintin this focus position on all the images.
• Do not keep the Auto White Balance on the camera. Instead, select one single WB mode that will be used on all images.
• If you do a horizontal panorama, shoot in vertical (portrait) orientation (to increase the usable surface and to improve the final resolution).
• Make sure that you have a wide cross-image section to ease the merging process. The merging software package will thank you.

If like me your a photographer who wouldn’t dare making a video, you still can think about doing a decent time-lapse sequence out of your photographs. However, this cannot happen just by taking images and loading them into a software.

You must start by studying the lessons from PhotoJojo.com’s Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography.

When you think that you’ve mastered the technique, you can think again and look at the following example created by Lucas Oleniuk, photographer of the Toronto Star. Taking 20,000 of his still photographs, he built a 20-days sequence re-hashing the issue of global warming for us.

Direct link to video