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Oranje Goes Down Tomorrow

Click Image to Visit Oranje

Click Image to Visit Oranje

OK, tomorrow night is this year’s Oranje. Oranje, for those who (like me until last month) don’t know, is apparently a big art gala, with local artist of all types (painters, chefs, photographers, DJs, bands, etc) come and sell their stuff and do their thing and play on six stages in a 2 story warehouse all night.

So of course we encourage you to be a part of the art community and go to it. Former Roberts’ desk girl and all-around-fabulous photographer Jennifer Parker will be manning (er, womanning?) a booth there, among all the other festivities.

Tickets are 20 bucks, you can nab them at the door. Click the image for full details. Go there, find Nick and I (we’ll be there with our girlfriends and our good buddy Max), check out the local photogs, be inspired, come back to us and get some gear to go out there and unleash your artistic vision.

Like, for example, a Lensbaby Composer, maybe?



Photowalk = Success

_8267107Once again we photo-walked this week, and once again if you weren’t there you really missed out. DJ Jared was great to work with (and we thank him for giving us his time, if you were out there and had shots get them to me so we can share them with him in thanks). We had an Elinchrom Ranger pack and an A head with a softbox and some bounce reflectors, so we were able to shoot mixed strobe and ambient on location. We also had some of the new Lensbaby products out with us, showing off the Composer and the swappable optics system (which I hereby propose we call “swaptics”).

And, it was a good mash-up out there. Nick and I were shooting our trademark Olympus cams, Dawn brought her Nikon D40, one gent used Panasonic’s LX3 point-and-shoot, another the original 5D, and Tony showed up with a medium-format view camera. Film, people! Film! Craziness.

It was a lot of fun. There was shooting, strobing, and later, a motorcycle. Check out the pictures in the gallery below, and make sure to find your way out to next week’s walk so that you to can start padding your portfolio with awesome shots.

We run a Flickr group dedicated to showing off pics from the various photowalks, and you can find that over at http://www.flickr.com/groups/nick-and-dereks-walkabout/. You have to join, just so we can keep it strictly to photowalks and not get a lot of the vaguely tangentially-related chaffe that you get with Flickr groups, but don’t let that turn you off. We want to see what you got out there.

It’s like fishing stories, but for photographers.

“One time, I had this awesome shot. Stellar. Change your life. There was this chick–and she was hot–and there was this explosion and a cow tap dancing.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Can I see it?”

“Ah, no. It got away. I forgot I had my camera set to ‘FAIL’ priority…”



Sony rends shroud, reveals a500 and a550 -live view, HDR, SDHC, alphabet soup!

Sony Alpha A550

Sony Alpha A550

Sony’s offerings, the a550 and a500 have a big, beautiful (and looks affordable) bowl of alphabet soup. Hur hur. The dish looks like this:

APS-C CMOS Exmor – 14.2 megapixels in the a550 and 12.3 in the a500 -both with an ISO up to 12800.
HDR – two images combined in less than ten seconds to produce HDR (and even counteract your coffee shaking hands)
CCD-Shift SteadyShot Inside – Keeping image stabilization corporeal (you know, in the body) for 2.5-3.5 stops
TFT Xtra Fine LCD – 921,600 dots that you can angle up, down, all 3 inches of it, on the back of your a550
TFT Clear Photo LCD – 230,400 dots with the same range of motion with as above, but this is on the a500
RAW+JPEG – YEAH!
NP-FM500H – 1650mAh for neigh on 1000 shots using the viewfinder.

Ok, it’s not Campbell’s, but there’s enough to play magnetic poetry. (Exmor Steady, Xtra Shot Fine).

In any case, Sony’s continued effort to layer features across price-points is promising. They’ve both got two sensors for live view through the viewfinder using phase detect AF and the usual, slower, method for what they dub Manual Focus Check Live View – as a Lensbaby user and being a fan of a fast manual focus prime (Derek’s OM 50mm 1.4), that’s a nice feature.

Call us up to get on the wait list early – 800-726-5544.



Keep on keepin’ on.

Alright boys and girls, step right up, bring yourselves, bring your cameras, bring hot shoe flashes and accessories, bring your friends who wear hot shoes and flashy accessories – we’re doing another Photowalk on Wednesday, April 22nd.

Thanks again to Chris and Tony who came out this week, despite the chill, despite the humidity, despite the overcast, way too evenly diffused lighting.

I ran into a snag, of sorts this week, one which I intend to Crumple next week. The snag? Adding Derek’s Lensbaby 3G to my bag for a few days. Now my handy little Olympus kit bag is bursting with kitted goodness and things are more crowded than a Tokyo subway. Despite my 410′s dinky body, one attached and two floating lenses is more bacon than the pan can handle.

My chosen solution is the Crumpler Six Million Dollar Home. I know you know that D-mart is a Crumpler devotee, and I’m getting convinced myself. They’re heavy duty, water-repellent bags with massive amounts of velcro, fat padding, and are run by guys who will measure the capacity of their bags with six packs. Now if only camera manufacturers would start using jiggers as a metric for bokeh…



What’s In a Bag?

ThinkTank Streetwalker (Please, Withhold All Jokes for Later)So, it’s been a while since we’ve hit up a Raw Footage (my camera-man has been busy the past month), but I’m going to try and get a packing exercise done later for the ThinkTank Photo Streetwalker, which is actually a surprisingly trim and still roomy backpack (and of the tried-and-true “strap a camera tripod to the back” variety at that”).

And, while I’m thinking bags, Chuck forwarded me a mail yesterday, in which a reader name of “Greg” said he’d like to know what we over at Roberts shove into our bags. You know, Greg, I think it’s a great idea, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to con anyone else into talking. Might be fun to try and get a shot of Jody’s gear, though…

But, I thought, hey, I may as well talk a bit about the various odd bits and digital camera accessories that’ve sorted themselves into my Crumpler since I shot the footage of me packing it:

1. Olympus digital camera kit. Anyone who reads this blog knows I shoot an Oly kit. E-3, 50-200mm, an old 50mm Zukio f1.8, and a Lensbaby 3G. I’m angling to add a 14-54 to my kit sometime (hey, how about it Oly, you wanna hook me up with an old demo one? Eh? Eh?)

2. A Nikon SB-25, which I found in our venerable Used Department. I use it with a Wein peanut slave as an off-camera key light.

3. Two custom flash modifiers.

4. Two medium plastic spring clamps. And a little 2″ metal c-clamp (hey, you never know, I might need that!)

5. An LED flashlight (never know when you need to shed a little light on the subject).

6. A Roberts card wallet with a selection of mismatched flash memory cards.

7. A Lensbaby creative aperture kit.

8. A Crumpler beer bottle opener (in true Crumpler style, called “The Boozer’s Friend”)

9. An Altec Lansing Orbit portable speaker (for jamming out when shooting models outdoors)



7 Million Dollar Home: Video Review

Alright, in honor of my bag upgrade we’re going to start a specialized segment of Roberts Raw for bag capacities. We’re going to kick it off with my own personal kit (actually, there was some space left so I borrow a few extra products from our display rack to pad it out) and a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home to show you about what you can expect it to hold. Because, let’s face it, if you’re anything like me you read the interior dimensions of a bag and go “that’s great, now how much is that in equipment?”

You can watch the video below, no frills, just quick bag packing, to see how much equipment this particular bag can swallow. If you want to see a specific ag you’ve been eyeing packed, hit us up in the comments or email me at [email protected] We’ll select two bags a month and pack different types of kits–Canon digital SLR cameras, Nikon flashes, Sony lenses, compact camcorders, you name it–all specifically chosen to give you a good visual estimate of how much you’ll be able to squeeze in.

This particular bag held all this equipment: Olympus E-3, Olympus 50-200mm, Olympus 18-180mm, Olympus 12-60mm, Olympus Zuiko 50mm, Lensbaby 3G, Nikon SB-25, Metz 58 AF-1, Joby Gorillapod SLR-Zoom, Induro SA-0, Roberts card wallet, miscelleneous small bits and accessories.



Waiting for a New Bag

7 Million Dollar Home So, I tok the dive and decided to upgrade my bag. This is a big step in a man’s life, maybe not as important as his first date or his first cup of coffee, but important nonetheless. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of variables have to be carefully weighed and examined before a choice can be made. What equipment do I have? What equipment will I have? How much do I want to carry day-to-day? What style? What color? These days there’s a dizzying, near-infinite combination as answers and a different bag for each (here at Roberts alone we have around 800 different style/color options available).

So, I sat down, and I thought about my “tackle.” An Olympus digital camera, mid-sized. A fairly chunky but not huge telephoto zoom. A standard zoom. A Lensbaby 3G. A very tiny Zuiko prime from the 70s. An aging but still excellent SB-25 (found in the Nikon flashes down in our used store). I’ll be adding a Metz 58 AF-1OP as soon as the funds come up next year. I’ve got a Gorillapod SLR-Zoom with an Induro SA-0 on it (a nice substitute for camera tripods, useful for remote flash work.) A slew of the usual digital camera accessories: an extra battery, some cables, the aperture for the Lensbaby, a spare compact flash memory card or two.

In the future there might be another lens or two, and I might start carrying around a back-up body, so I need a bag with a lot of space and a bit more I can milk out of it.

But I hate those monolithic black ballistic nylon backback bags. Don’t get me wrong, companies like ThinkTank Photo make some very slick offerings in that style. But it’s not for me.

So I have a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home on its way, in the tasty brown/oatmeal/green (they’ve apparently done away with the brown/green/blue version) color combo. Expect some pictures to come as I attempt to fit everything inside it.



New Lensbabies Are In

Jody Grober: Taking Care of BusinessI was downstairs playing with some new equipment while waiting for the next batch of Raw Footage clips to render, and I caught this shot of our own Jody Grober. It was shot with our display D90, newest of the Nikon digital SLR cameras in the prosumer tier. But, it wasn’t shot with any of our usual selection of Nikon lenses, instead I used our new Lensbaby Composer to catch this.

I talked about these waaaay back when they were announced, excited about the interchangeable optics and the simplified functionallity over my own Lensbaby 3G. The Composer uses a simplified ball-joint system with a traditional focus ring. It was pretty easy to use on the D90, with the usual Lensbaby caveat that if you point it too far off axis you can never achieve true focus. Within range, however, the Lensbaby doesn’t exhibit bad focus wide open (and I mean f2 wide open here). You can see a crop below taken handheld at 1/100 at f2, focused using live view magnification to assure the best focus I could get. I’ve pulled out a detail of the shot to show the focal point.

Sharpness and Focus

As you can see, the Lensbaby won’t win any awards for tack sharp focus wide open, but it’s certainly not bad and a little post sharpening helps it a lot. But, that creamy out of focus background is hard to imitate, look at the phone (maybe 8″ away) dissolve as it extends out of the frame. And, as you’d expect, stopping the lens down a bit will help improve sharpness across the board, and you can stop down to f22 using the provided aperture discs.

So, make sure to check out the Lensbaby, one of my favorite digital camera accessories and one of the most fun and challenging lenses to use. It’ll make you see differently. Check out all our Lensbabies here. If you shoot Olympus digital cameras, or  are looking to buy Sony Alpha cameras instead of Canon or Nikon call us up, we can get you a ‘baby in the mount you need.



Bokeh Power!

Alright, I’m way over-due on this. I apologize, I’ve been buried the past week adding some new top-level categories to or site (it is however a lot easier to find bags, memory cards, filters, and batteries on our site. Just saying…). So, let’s talk about the few remaining aspects of bokeh.

So, got those Canon lenses, Nikon lenses, Olympus lenses, Pentax lenses, etc… ready?

OK. aperture.


Back in that bad old days (whether or not it was in the heat of a summer sun or in the land of the dollar bill is your call), we mostly had lenses looked like this bad-boy to the left. I’ve gone ahead and closed its aperture down so I can make a point about its shape. Namely, you can clearly see it’s a hexagon. That’s right, six blades make for a very hexagonal aperture. Now, the thing is, the shape of your aperture will affect your bokeh. Out of focus spectral highlights will take on the shape of your aperture.

If you don’t believe me, check out Popular Photography’s little video made with a Nikon D90 and a Lensbaby with a custom aperture (in this case a jack-o-lantern smile):

To cut a long story short, most people, for general purposes, swear that the closer you get your aperture to true circular, the better your bokeh will be. Companies are working on this in many ways, including going to 8 or 9 blade diaphragms and even in some cases using curved blades so instead of straight sides like in that old Zuiko I pictured they curve, further imitating a circle.




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