Review | Reassess | Respond | Rinse & Repeat

Lenticular cloud formation above Old Man Range, Central Otago, New Zealand

My (unofficial) mantra is as follows: nature photographers don't make great photos - nature does.

My job is to turn up on the day and not bugger up a fantastic photographic opportunity.

It is my responsibility to pack my gear, set the alarm clock (especially for sunsets if I get to sneak in an afternoon kip in the car) and at all times ensure that my intravenous caffeine kit is primed and ready.

That's about it - from there on in it's a mind game really; find the right spot, figure out a composition - test shoot it, realise it was crap : panic : find alternative spot : rinse and repeat until done.

The pressure really comes on when nature puts on a show - that's when you find out how good you are. A good nature photographer has to read the signs, pre-visualise shots and then be willing toss all of those pre-conceptions out the window when things change.

Review, reassess, respond - rinse and repeat.

No, it's not very zen like - but I find it thrilling.

Sunset Lenticular cloud formations above Clyde, Central Otago, New Zealand

The two shots on this post were taken on the same evening - I had been watching the cloud formations all day and figured there was a good chance of some sunset goodness.

Over a period of an hour I shot at least 10 top grade compositions. I had never shot at this location before and it was a mission - incredible light and clouds every where you looked but very few clean compositions.

By the end of the evening there were lens caps, filters, lens hoods and jackets spread all over the area - but somehow I came away with a bag full of shots - and a night to remember!

Sisson Product Photography

Hey I just realised that clicking these images opens them bigger - try it you'll like it!


The sisson - beautiful pictures of New Zealand - website is finally nearing completion* - thank God!!!

Countless hours have been spent grovelling to the over-lords at google - optimising pages, renaming images and re-working the descriptions for each of our 310 products into uniquely tempting metadata morsels for the 'spiders' and 'bots' to feast upon.

If any of the preceding sentence:

a) sounds remotely interesting to you.
b) made any sense.

I suggest that you sign up on this website for uber-dweebs that I found myself languishing on yesterday. Just don't expect to see The Autocrat trolling the forums with biting witticisms about metatag refresh rates, referring to google and yahoo as simply G & Y, or making suggestions on Alt- Tag optimisations - for the first time in weeks I found a site that I didn't subscribe to.

As usual I digress.

The final barrier to completion has had nothing to do with this techno-babble, it has had everything to do with our photography, more specifically, photos of our finished products deployed in the home.

We genuinely thought that this would be easy - given that we used to earn our living as commercial photographers. We also think that our products actually look pretty snappy.

Unfortunately after three or four attempts at shooting our fine-art prints, photo blocks and photo magnets at home we had exactly zero shots that successfully represented our work.

Both of us were suffering from a crisis of confidence. So we sat down together to analyze the shots. It rapidly dawned on us that our toddler-infested suburban residence was holding us back.

Although it is a nice house, not a single room will ever grace the front cover of architectural digest - or, for that matter, the back pages of remotely interesting homes weekly.

So today we loaded up the car and headed around to Mark & Sharon's house (yes the same Mark that seems to appear in 50% of these posts) to try out our luck there.

I am happy to report that three hours in their beautiful home yielded all the shots we needed and partially re-inflated our sagging egos**!

Now that's more like it! - one of Sarah's shots displayed in a snazzy environment

There are many more shots on the home page slideshow over at sisson fresh New Zealand photography - check them out :)

Cheers! TA


* to our dismay, we have learned that a good website is an 'ever-changing, dynamic organism' that is, by definition, never completed. For more information spend a week or two on the forums at webmasterworld.com :)

** despite outward appearances photographers have notoriously fragile egos - hence the abnormally high incidence of leather jacket wearing press photographers (its a metaphorical thick skin thing).

Battered is Better - No not a discussion about blue cod....

I love 'battle-worn' camera gear. I get the warm fuzzies whenever I notice that the black anodizing has worn through to reveal bare aluminium near a button or switch on my camera body. My pulse quickens when I spy a piece of rubberised plastic slowly dissolving after hundreds of hours of contact with my (apparently quite grimy) hands.

I can't profess to have reached this level of wear & tear but my 4 year old D2X is just starting to get good. No real monster dings or scrapes, more of a cumulative patina of pragmatic decay - including a very stubborn and quite crusty spot of egg yolk ingrained in the rubber at this year's toga party riots in Dunedin.

Toga threesome: glad you lot are having fun.... I'm still finding egg on my gear.

I can trace this admiration for deterioration back to 1997. Sarah & I were at a weekend workshop with Art Wolfe and Nikon had sent some kind of ambassador/legend guy along to show off 800mm lenses and the recently released F5 body.

Nikon F5 - creator of many a late night fantasy during the 1990's and possible vanquisher of bears

This dude was seriously cool. Not that he thought so at all - which, of course, is why he was so cool. He had the air of a survivor, a war-torn photo-journalist turned nature photographer who had seen things that would leave poseurs such as myself looking for a new career.

Apparently his pre-production F5 had been quite instrumental in his continued ability to breath. Casual (yet reverent) inspection suggested that en-route to the workshop, our man had extricated himself out of tight spot with a Kodiak bear - by using his F5 as a club.

Furthermore, It appeared that upon reaching his car he had succumbed to a spot of shock and, for reasons known only to him, attached his camera to the tow ball of his car and high-tailed it to the nearest bar (180 miles away in Anchorage).

His camera looked absolutely shagged. The finder prism was dented in, rubber was torn off, only about 40% of the black anodizing remained - but apparently it still worked like a charm.

Nikon couldn't have orchestrated a better PR campaign if they tried (frankly, I doubt that nikon marketing could never do anything that clever).

I was sold on nikon from that day onwards and despite my grumblings I still am. Their pro body build quality and performance in really tough environments is as exceptional today as it was 15 years ago - cue the Kodiaks!

TA

My Next Nikon......

doesn't exist.....

I have been waiting for nikon to build my next camera for about two and a half years now. They released the D3 about 18 months ago and followed it up with the more compact but equally capable D700. These are both superb 'full-frame' bodies, and they set new benchmarks in terms of noise performance , making ISO 3200 (and even 6400) a viable option in low light conditions. However, at 12MP they didn't address my primary requirement for an upgrade - more (and better) pixels than my venerable D2X.

If we were still shooting commercial work every week I would have been all over the D700, as its' performance for my University work and Sarah's available-light fashion photography would have made it outstanding value for money at $5400 (when released).


The D3/D700's High ISO performance makes it perfect for this type work.

For the majority of our commercial work 12 MP is the perfect file size - you don't require a Kray Supercomputer to keep the post production pipeline efficient and very few clients actually print larger than A4. Having said that we have seen our D2X studio shots printed beautifully as billboards.

12MP is more than enough resolution for most clients - if only they knew that!

However, the sisson fresh new zealand imagery range is a different beast altogether. For the past two years we have been shooting primarily landscape and nature and despite NZ being located on the edge of a tectonic plate it seems that our mountains don't move very much.

Hence, 90% of our work is done off a tripod at ISO 100 and we often find ourselves trying to slow exposures down, rather than speed them up via a higher ISO setting. Add to this the aggressive anti-aliasing filters on the D3 sensor and there is not a marked quality discrepancy between the D2X and the D3/D700 at base ISO settings.

Why the need for more pixels? Call it future proofing. As our business is developing we are discovering more demand for bigger and bigger prints. As each landscape shot is unique and unrepeatable, it makes sense to be capturing at the current 'state of the art' for your chosen format to allow for future use - who knows, Tourism NZ may yet come knocking for a billboard campaign ;-)

we've had enough of shooting beautiful models - maybe next time it'll be a mountain range...

So, for about a year I had been glued to the excellent nikonrumors.com seeking clues as to what Nikon's response to canon's DSLR offerings would be. Rumours flared up and died with each trade fair or pending media event. During this time Nikon released wierdy beardy 'multimedia headsets' for Japan only, more crappy software (please leave that to adobe), spent vast amounts on advertising 'Something Big' which turned out to be a washed up blues band playing at a wedding photographers convention (shudder), and to complete this cocktail of woe, they made the highest resolution camera in their range a coolpix (not cool nikon, not cool at all).

And then in late 2008 my spirits were lifted by three huge announcements. Firstly, Axl Rose finally set a release date for the, 14 years in the making, GN'R album Chinese Democracy (yes I am a proud Nelson bogan), Canon announced the 21MP 5dMKii with a $4,950 list price and (finally) Nikon announced the D3X*.

The D3X specs were impressive - 24 million beautifully executed pixels and excellent noise performance in a bomb-proof body (it has since been deemed the finest DSLR in the market by many photographers that I respect) - perfect! .....

Except for one minor detail. The price - an amex blistering $17,200 (I believe it was over $21,000 for about 3 days, until 'market considerations' forced a re-think).

Yep, $17k for a camera that will have a resale of $1,500 in 3 years time. $17K for a camera equivalent to Canon's 21MP 5dMKii at $4,950 and Sony's 25MP A900 at $7,500. Most importantly, $17K for a camera body during the most grueling economic climate I can remember. That's just not happening round here....

Axl Rose: the only thing crazier than the D3X list price?
So, we had a business decision to make about six weeks ago. Since the kids have been born, it has been only one of us shooting at any given time, so one main kit has been workable. With both of us now shooting together we need two complete rigs (extensive field testing has shown gear sharing to be detrimental to the health of our relationship).

So we bought a 5Dii. Yep, we snagged a pre-price rise body, a mint 2nd hand 17-40 f4, 24-105 f4, and a 70-200 f4 all for well under $10K from P&V. I can't be bothered doing the sums, but, considering that we would have been purchasing a similar suite of lenses for our notional D3X we must be looking at a first division powerball type saving on this deal.

Sure, I have some problems with the 5d and these will be detailed in my next post, but these are not $12,000 issues - maybe $783.96 worth at best - but it cannot be bettered for return on investment.

So the bottom line? I love my Nikon gear, I prefer using it to the Canon system, but we run a business. Nikon have about 6 months left during which to release a competitively priced, compact, high resolution body. Failing this, there will some well worn nikon gear appearing in the cabinets at P&V**. So come on Nikon give me my D700x or preferably a D700T (you know what the T stands for :-)

TA

* I have never even touched a D3X - simply out of fear that somehow I will concoct a rationale for purchasing one.
** I expect emergency board meetings are being scheduled at nikon HQ as you read this :)

NZ Photography Hotspots - Mt Cook/Lake Pukaki

My blog has segued quite dramatically towards becoming a parenting and relationships column recently. The web has enough of that 'content' already, so I thought I had better get some photography postings up before I find myself sharing my to-die-for pecan and maple muffin recipe with you!

So it is with great pleasure that I announce the release of part 1 of our 2 part Mt Cook photo-guide here.

We have also posted several shots from our recent trip on flickr ,so check them out. Everyone is going gaga over Sarah's shots and I am now feeling inadequate vulnerable and under-appreciated - think I'll go bake a tray of my incredible mocha banana brownies OMG they are sooo goooood!!!! I'll get the recipe up tomorrow ;-)

If you have found us on blogger, remember to drop by our website to view our New Zealand Photography :)

NZ Photography Hotspots - Moeraki Boulders

I have just posted a short hotspot review of the magnificent Moeraki Boulders, a location I have had hours of fun shooting at.

You can find it here.

Welcome to the photo autocracy

Howdy, welcome to the photo autocracy - future home to my un-censored ramblings, ruminations and randomisations (as well as a fair amount of alliteration).

I will be using this 'forum' to keep you up to date with articles, postings and work in progress over at sisson.co.nz - our website/store. This blog is an opinion-piece, pure and simple, and while little or no effort will be expended in researching or preparing posts, I can guarantee with almost 50% certainty that 50% of what I write will be 50% accurate some of the time. This almost certainly makes the information on these pages about 200% more accurate than most of the crud that poses as 'expert advice' on the web.

So the ball is in your court - read my articles, edit out the bits you don't want to believe and take the rest as divine gospel - perfect!

What you will find me writing about in the future:

• New Zealand Landscape photography advice
• General photographic philosophy
• Photographic gear advice and opinions (mainly nikon)
• Our photographic adventures
• Digital photography tips & philosophy
• New Zealand travel advice
• Anything else that cranks my tractor

Just a note on comments, although the blog is called the photo autocracy I have given a nod to the forces of democracy by enabling comments - think of it as a benevolent dictatorship. Feel free to post positive comments, I see little point in disagreeing with me as your opinion will undoubtedly be misguided and inevitably wrong. Hence, I will not be engaging in discussion, debate or good ol' fashioned flame-fests on the comments board.

Yours benevolently - The Autocrat