Amature, Professional or Master?

I saw this quote in a sig — but it was on a German forum and I was reading via Google translator so I’m not sure the original wording.  But I love the quote, if you know where it comes from originally let me know!

  • Amateurs worry about their gear
  • Professionals worry about the profit
  • Masters worry about the light

I recognize myself in that first one!  🙂  But I’m trying to think about light more — people in the street must find me strange when I suddenly stare at the palm of my hand, but I’m looking at how the light is falling on it.  Palms being a good substitute for faces when it comes to exposure.   Here in the city in autumn there are often interesting effects as the sun low in the sky reflects from glass walled buildings, sometimes once or twice, to produce natural cross lighting.

Troubleshooting WIA connections

I can’t tell why it is that the Camera Control script doesn’t work for some systems, but I presume it is some difference in the WIA configuration or settings of that camera or PC.  If you’d like me to try to fix it for your system then I’ll need some more details.

Use this WIA test program, from http://www.milika.net/, to get the details of your WIA connection and send them to me.  You can leave them as a comment here or email them to me at raymond -at- this domain name (diyphotobits.com).

Thanks.

ps. note that it is a RAR, not a ZIP.

Does the tethered Shooting script work for Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic etc etc

A lot of people ask and I don’t know — it probably does work as it is using a standard Windows way of talking to the camera — WIA — but I don’t have the hardware to test it.

If a camera supports a “PTP” or “MTP” mode — and if when plugged into a PC it is visible in My Computer under the section for Scanners and Cameras

 (not as a removable disk drive) then it is liable to work.  The only big gotcha I can see is that some cameras — all the P&S I’ve tried — will not let me press the shutter button while they are plugged into the PC.  It seems that ability is a DSLR thing.

So, if you happen to have a non-Nikon DSLR handy and don’t mind spending a few minutes testing I’d be delighted to hear whether this script works for you.  Obviously for Canon users it’s beside the point as proper remote control software is included with the camera — but it is still technically interesting.

If you get any results please leave me a comment, many thanks!

How fast is tethered shooting on a Windows PC?

I was thinking about this after reading Terry White’s post about the topic, though he is more interested in Mac vs PC (or Mac vs Windows really).  Interestingly he was able to do a Mac vs Windows test on the same hardware which of course makes it much more valid test.  The interesting conclusion is that the Camera-to-Lightroom total speed is almost identical, though the download vs import speed varies a lot.

A lot of the time taken up is in Lightroom which I have not tried so far, I’m still using Adobe Bridge to view my JPG and RAW (NEF) files.  That’s why I did a version of my tethered shooting script that is optimized for Bridge – which is to say it sends a keypress to bridge to advance to the most recent frame.

Testing with my configuration showed that the total time of camera-to-bridge was averaging slightly less than 3 seconds.  I did these tests with my D40 shooting raw – so that’s a 5mb file, via a USB2 hub connected to a fast but rather old Dell PC.  I’ll try it again later with the D300 which has the larger files to see how much difference there is; not a lot I suspect based on previous un-timed test.

In Terry’s tests the CCP2 import under Windows took 3.2 seconds, which is similar to my script, but then the import into Lightroom took 8 seconds – I believe Bridge is showing images much faster.  Of course the intial view it gives you is a preview but it’s normally less than a second for it to render a high quality view.

Does all this make much difference?  Not if you are doing product shots I think, but if you are shooting models then shaving seconds off each shot would be good I think.

Conclusion?  If speed is important shoot into a temp folder and use Bridge to view as you go, then import later when you are done.

PS: Still need to upload my Tethered Remote Bridge script — aka the self-portrait script!

Welcome to DIY Photo Bits . Com

Welcome!

This is doing to be my place to drop into the internet the few bits and pieces that my ever fertile imagination has come up with as tools and home grown gizmos to assist in photography.

First up is going to be the Shooting Tethered script – and then I think I’ll have a go at documenting my bamboo light stands.