Forget Forgetting - Carry A Spare In The Boot - With Promaster

No end of people need a tripod for the occasional landscape or group shot, but never want to carry their big studio model with them. They sometimes try to get a tiny travel tripod to attach to their camera bag but are horrified when they see the weight and size equation that this creates.

Overseas travel needs this equation to be solved with very small figures - but that means that the price goes up. That is inescapable - and if you add a further requirement of large lenses or camera bodies you need to go even further up the price scale. Eventually it becomes cheaper to just import the landscape rather than buy the tripod that you need to go photograph it...

If you are only going to be in the city, state, or country and plan to drive your car to the shoot, think about having a really cheap and light tripod in the boot of the car. It will be best suited to mirror-less cameras and it will not have carbon fibre or super complicated head but it will be there when you need it. If your wife drops a bag of superphosphate on it you'll only be out 50 bucks.

We've got good, cheap Promaster Vectra Delux tripods in store right now  for $ 50. Flip-lock legs, central rising column, three-way video head and even a little quick-release plate. You can afford it and you might just need it.

Something for the weekend, Sir?

Tiny Studio With Cullmann And Promaster

 For the last year I have been shifting a number of interesting boxes from Cullmann around the shop shelves. The studio support sets come in various sizes - from basic to humongous with every camp known to man - and up to now I have never experimented with them. And normally I try everything that is lying around undisturbed. Ask some day about the container of hydrochloric acid and the pool chlorine...

Any rate, the Flexx Support Set is the one I raided to make the editorial studio. The desk drawer slides backward and provides and edge to attach the camera support. I elected to attach the X-10 camera to it and it is totally solid. Exposures of a second are no problem.

Fortunately the exposures can be shorter than that with an aperture of f:8 to f:16 - the camera runs at ISO 500 now and there is a Cullmann Copter tabletop tripod that acts as a light stand. On top of it is a small Promaster LED 30 light unit. If I can wangle one of the new LEDGO units we'll have even more power and shorter exposures.

None of this lighting is Steve Sint stuff - it will take a little more time to figure out  good main and fill for this tiny area - but the ability to shoot fast and illustrate as soon as an article is written in invaluable.

Anyone who shoots products or tabletop subjects would be well advised to come browse among the Cullmann accessory kits.

First Fruits Of The Furniture - The New Fuji Lens - With The Old Fuji Lens

Okay, that could have been clearer, but as long as you have read this far, you might as well continue...

The new editorial desk has been equipped with a seamless scoop to facilitate taking product shots. In the grand tradition of the Hazel Leaf Studio AKA DIY Palace, it is comprised of two sheets of A3+ matt paper and one big piece of mounting board. It wedges into the tabletop of the desk and a tripod holds the Fuji camera to take pictures of the Fuji lens.

The lighting is supplied by the Catch As Catch Can Company, but this will be improved upon. After all, we ARE a camera store...

The subject of the photograph is the latest and nicest of the Fuji X-Mount lenses. 56mm f:1.2. Sharp as on the focus plane and soft as behind it. The ideal companion for X-E2, X-Pro1 and X-T1 if you are gong to be a low-light street photographer or natural-light portrait artist.

Be prepared for a hefty lens - not as weighty as some of the DSLR lenses, but more than some of the other Fuji glass. It is a deliberate lens to use. Be prepared for a real snap as it comes into focus.

The picture of the 56mm is pin sharp itself because it is taken with he Fuji 60mm macro. Almost the same focal length but an entirely different philosophical approach to it - it is a lens that will produce extremely big extremely close images but only opens to f:4 - hence the tripod. But what a magnificent working optic for art copy or collection recording.

Numismatists and philatelists please take notice - A Fuji X-series camera and this lens will make the best images of your possessions that can be done - and you can do them yourself. You've been promising yourself that you will document the collection. Winter is coming - now is the time.

No Need To Be Koi About It - Use A Polariser

The Japanese fish in this picture are pretty contented. They live at the Asakusa Temple in Tokyo and are cared for in the ornamental pond - there are a number of signs warning people not to feed them, so I suspect they are sometimes too well cared for. No matter - they are spectacular and friendly. Perfect subjects for a picture.

Except when the skylight blocks out the surface of the water. Then you see whatever is bouncing off that surface. It is the same with shop windows and other shiny surfaces.

Answer is, and always has been, to use a polarising filter on your lens. The older types were known as linear polarisers and did a very good job of seeing down into water surfaces. The newer types are called circular polarisers and may be a little less effective in actually penetrating the surface, but do give a more accurate light meter reading. The Circ Pol's are the ones most often supplied for modern digital cameras.

We've got 'em from Kenko, Hoya, Promaster, and B+W. They are not as cheap as UV filters - never could be - but they are a pretty essential tool for landscape and marine photographers. Useful, too for correcting colours under trees in open sunshine - you can lose the blue fill from Western Australian skies. particularly recommended for bridal work in these circumstances.

Studio? Well there are times when you need to see into things and these can help. You can also use them with sheets of polarising film and studio lights if you are going to copy glossy or textured flat art work. a little more complex than just twirling it in front of the lens when you are out at the beach, but essential to capture the true colours of some canvases.

Note for newbies: Either put a UV on the lens or a Polariser. Not together. Too many glass surfaces, and sometimes you start to unscrew the UV when you think you are turning the Circ Pol.

Sand Bags, Shot Bags, And Tea Bags

I bags being in the next photo shoot!

This whole Friday morning footle came about when one of our good clients called a moment ago to pick up some rental lighting gear for a shoot in the city. I must record my admiration for his packing ability - he got more in the boot of a Holden than I could fit into a moving van. I think he will be getting some of it out with a crowbar, but that is his problem...

He hired some sand bags to help stabilise light stands. A good idea if you are working in a wind or in the midst of a crowd of tourists. There is a lot of weight on the top of a light stand and if it overbalances... it comes down like a comet. If you stack the sandbags on the  legs you prevent this.

He also mentioned that he had a bunch of sandbags that used to be standard equipment in ambulances. After speculating that these would have been used to cosh the noisier patients...an unworthy thought...I realised that they were the same as the lead shot bag I used to encounter in operating theatres. It was basically a dead pad into which the head and neck could be pressed to prevent movements while the patient was unconscious. As I was sometimes applying pretty heavy force to those unconscious heads, it needed to be solid to resist. I'm happy to say that ALL of those heads eventually became conscious again. Sore, but conscious.

I note that there are also commercially-made bags for lighting situations that are empty with quick-seal flaps. You can carry them empty to a shoot and then fill them with sand, rocks, or whatever heavy at the site. A very good idea.

I have often wondered if there would be a good point in providing a head attachment that would go on the top of a standard 1/2" light stand spigot with three additional rings - you could guy the the thing to the ground if you were sending the flash head up really high. Nowadays the Suberp Profoto Air flashes have wireless adjustment as well as triggering so once it is up you could vary it to suit yourself without having to demount the guys.

Oh, and the tea bags are or after the shoot. White and one for me, thanks.

Singhing In The Rain

Here is a post for all our Sikh* photographers.

Have you considered getting one of the Promaster 72" white umbrellas for your studio? We have one in the shop right now and it is the most marvellous light shaper that you have ever seen. It is the BIGGEST light shaper you have ever seen, with the exception of the Redwing soft box we had a few years ago that needs a commercial scaffolding firm to erect.

People sometimes decry the humble umbrella, but when it is 72 inches in diameter it is not humble. It will throw massively soft light either as reflected or shoot through. It is not too heavy, though it will be necessary to consider the effect of wind if you are going to take it outside. Normally something this big in a stiff breeze has either Mary Poppins or a paratrooper under it...

If you cannot manage the full 72", we also have 60" and 45" sizes. Some of them are white and some are black/silver.

*And all those who are seeking to do good studio photos.

Rude, Crude, and Successful

Thinking outside the square is generally lauded as progressive and intellectual. Standing outside the square gets you ridden down by French cavalry. Trust me on this*.

But thinking cheap is the best thing of all, particularly if you have to spend a great deal of money here at the shop to arrive at the most economical idea. I did and I have.

To get to the best cheap solution for a problem you have to consult the Oracle of Google. You sit in a darkened room and try to think of enough key words to send you to a website that will have done your thinking for you - in reality it just dumps you onto YouTube and you watch cats fall into bathtubs.

I adopted the policy of buying whatever looked cool as soon as it came in the shop, which accounts for the 54 camera bags that currently live in the shed. This shop is not the only culprit - the Crumpler man down in Wesley Arcade has much to answer for. In the end I have found out the best 4 bags for my several purposes and as long as I do not pass the bag shelves again when I have low blood sugar I should be okay.

This weekend's experiment involved a $ 14.95 Promaster plastic bubble level that slides into a hot shoe and a sticky label from a roll that I bought at Officeworks. This, combined with the Manfrotto carbon-fibre monopod that I got from our shop and my little Fuji camera let me take panoramas in Mandurah.

Why Mandurah? Why indeed...nevertheless, the setup makes use of the fact that Photoshop Elements has a wonderful little panorama maker. You supply it with files that are taken flat and level with a reasonable overlap, and it will stitch up a great scene. I'[ve decided that I only want landscape orientation and two panels so the trick is to get flat and level. The monopod supplies the axle upon which the camera turns and  the bubble level keeps it vertical. The only other problem is the overlap.

I used the back screen and the grid overlay to position a central object either 1/4 from the left or 1/4 from the right side. I drew in pencil on the paper label on top of the camera toward that central object in each case. Thus all I need to do is sight along the pencil lines left or right and take two snaps - perfect files for the computer.

Okay. This ain't Lawrence Livermore stuff, but it means I can get pano shots in the field with no tripod and an absolute minimum of preparation. I will have to set the distance and exposure manually for the shots - if you let the camera make its own decision it can make a different one for each view and the computer will be unhappy. But this means I can capture ALL of the Lincoln Continental at the car show instead of just the front half.

*Poking the Frenchman's horse in the nose with a bayonet solves that problem. Trust me on this.

The Low Priced Spread - Surprisingly Nutritious

Every so often something pops up here in the shop that surprises me. That's why we keep a big can of Mortein handy...boom boom...

No, really - we get products that do not attract the attention they deserve. One of which is this unassuming little travel tripod from Weifeng  - the WF 6615. The numbering tells me that it s probably made by the same people who make Fancier and we have had some good tripods from them in the past.

The older ones were extremely good value for money, but heavy. This latest offering goes the other way - it is a travel tripod that tries to give the most stability for smallest size and weight. I think it succeeds admirably.

Cynics and smart-alecs will look at a lot of products and mumble the names of their competitors and try to suggest that they are a knock-off. Perhaps, but when you consider the price, they are not rip-offs. This little tripod walks out of the door ( on three legs...) for a measly $ 149.

The quick release plate on the top is Arca-size so you can interchange it onto a lot of other gear . Gone, I fervently pray, are the days of Optex and Vanguard and Uncle Fred's Tripod and Bait Shoppe brand tripods that had their own mutually incompatible plates. We regularly see sad hopefuls trolling the streets for old unmatchable plates and it means trouble. Weifeng at least decided to copy the one of the main players.

There is a securing post on the underside of the quick release holder as well as a green bubble level that are a touch that might well be copied by other manufacturers - they are actually useful. The whole thing even comes in a bag for that price.

Jason says Weifeng is a first name, so maybe that's who makes them...Uncle Weifeng.

I Lost My Heart...

In San Francisco. Tony Bennett found it, but won't send it back. Bummer, dude...

I also lost my charger, download cable, and flash stand for my Canon 430 EX II, 600 RT. Nikon Sb700, and 910 flashes. That's a lotta losing, but I am careless when I go out to do strobist shooting.

Fortunately Promaster have come to the rescue - they have just sent us a supply of the multi-mount flash stands. These have thee shoe positions with locking holes for the standard flash hot-shoe and a 1/4" threaded hole in the underside for the light stand or tripod. it is a proper brass threaded socket too - good and tough.

Now the loss of the charger is also solvable with a Hahnel universal charger and the cable can be safely dispensed with now that I have a Hoodman RAW STEEL USB 3.0 card reader.

But it still leaves the problem of Tony Bennett...

Seeing Clearly Through Clear Glass

Well, I seen it. The customer brought it in and told me about it and I was just about to dismiss it as nonsense...but I took a look and he was right. I seen it.

He was concerned that the lens on his Nikon camera was playing up - that or the focusing screen. He said that when he took pictures of a bright light source on a dark field that he got "ghost" images all around the image. I was initally going to dismiss it as either a figment of his imagination or lens flare but I took his camera over to the bright LED lights on the new Nikon cabinet and looked.

You could see flare alright - no way you can expect not to. But there on either side of the main image were two separate faint images of the light. They moved around when you waved the lens past the light. Ghosts, but perfectly formed ones... ooeeooeeooeeooee...

A different lens showed none of this effect - you could get flare but no perfect little ghosts.

The culprit turned out to be an old uncoated Focal UV filter on the first lens. Clean enough, but every time you screwed it on the ghosts came back.

We screwed on a multi-coated UV filter from Kenko - not an expensive one, either. Ghosts exorcised!

Moral of this is listen to the customer, and throw out your old cheapjohn film filters and get some modern ones. There may be a lot of your image that is being obscured by ghosting right now that you do not even realise.

The Humbrella

The humble umbrella. Gene Kelly danced to stardom with one - apparently under a rain of diluted condensed milk ( It showed up better in the Klieg lights on set...wonder what the sound stage smelled like a week after the filming?) and they have featured in French films and Japanese paintings for centuries.

They also feature in some of the smaller ready-made flash systems. The Elinchrom company make a number of two-head kits that feature theses light modifiers. They are inexpensive, easy to carry, and foolproof.

Strobist kits also carry them - you are enjoined by the makers to fire your speed lights into them and reflect the light onto your subject as a wide, soft illumination. By and large they work every time.

The heading image is possibly the laziest product shot I have ever taken, as I did not move from the editorial swivel chair to do it. It shows the rack we have dedicated to Promaster umbrellas. These have a standard diameter shaft ( As opposed to the slightly smaller Elinchrom umbrellas) and are suitable for all sorts of studio monoblocks and speed light brackets. You can get quite large ones - up to 72 inches.

There is quite a variety of construction as well - the basic black outside is standard but you can get the interior with a white or a silver finish. The white has a softer illumination - the silver harder and more specular. There are shoot-through umbrellas that are a very soft modifier and some that amount to a soft box. Admittedly it works backwards as you fire your flash into it away from the subject and depend upon the reflective surface and a diffuser panel inside the umbrella to spread the light.

Best of all with any of them is the fact that you can go out to a job in the field with them collapsed and rolled up and then erect them in a second when you are in position. Soft boxes are never this easy - you either have to assemble them on he site with much bending of arms and puffing and cursing, or take them assembled in the car. They never fit easily in any car...

They are cheap, compared to soft boxes. If you have a need for soft light anywhere I can readily recommend one. In store now.

The Battery Sergeant

A few nights ago one of our photographers was using a very good little flash to assist his nighttime shots. He got great results but I could tell he was frustrated with the time required to recharge the flash between shots. I wasn't surprised - the flash only operates on AAA batteries. It is s great little unit but it is asking a lot of small cells when you flog them through a series of shots.

I find something of the same with my main portable flash - the Nikon SB 700. It fortunately uses AA batteries and I can put lithium cells in it, but even here there is a real problem of the cells getting hot as they discharge and somewhat slowing down. In the middle of a dance show I have to eject one set and let it cool on the floor while a fresh cold set go it. Granted you can get 600+ flashes from a set of batteries but you have to juggle things.

I was struck by a thought about the design of the guns and the type of battery. Would it not have been better for the manufacturer of the flash gun to make it take the same sort of rechargeable lithium cell that goes into the cameras? I am thinking of a flat pack like the EN-EL series of batteries. Then a photographer could keep a large set of charged cells for both camera and flash and quickly slip them in or out of the flash body.

This would have the advantage of selling more rechargeable lithium cells - and not losing this business to the general battery manufacturer. And of adding the sale of a charger to each flash gun.

Admittedly, that would have provided the general public with yet another opportunity to leave a charger in your hotel room when you check out. And another aftermarket sale for us...

Open Wide...

In 2007, having peered down cake-holes for nigh on 40 years on a professional basis ( as opposed to doing it for a hobby...) I sold the old dental chair and retired. It was time to get rid of it - it had had three changes of stained upholstery and the armrests were deeply finger-marked.

 During the 4 decades I attended hundreds of lectures illustrated with thousands of  intra and extra oral photographs. Three of them were good. The rest were masterpieces of illustrative skill but all you could see was teeth. It was like looking at the front grilles of Buicks, but at least the Buicks flossed...Thus my general advice to anyone wanting to take dental pictures is - don't.

If you insist on it, however, the best way I know is to use a digital SLR or mirrorless camera. I used to advise people to use ring-flash units for the illumination but that has stopped with the advent of the white LED light. Nowadays you can get a decent ring-shaped LED set that runs on AAA batteries or a mains adapter and mount it on the front of nearly any decent camera. If you then set the ISO of the camera to 400-800 ( or higher if it is a modern camera ) you can put the mode to "A" and set an aperture of f:8 to f:16. If you put your lens on manual and at the shortest focusing distance you can generally make a rather decent extra-oral shot. An excess of decency.

If you need a closer shot or one that goes far back in the arch, the true macro lens may be necessary. Costly, but close-focussing, and it lets you stand back a bit from the customer as you work... Some of the customers have breath that makes this a relief.

If you need to have more light - really - you can use the ring flash systems. Nikon, Sigma, Canon, and Metz make them. They are in various sizes and degrees of sophistication, and some of them are automatic enough to work most of the time. But there is an almighty pop as they go off that might spook the patient. Plus they generally are more complex so you end up with a system that your staff might not find as easy to use. If you consistently get overexposure or out of focus results it is advisable to beat the nurse with a stick.

What you do with the results is different than the old days. The Carousel slide tray full of VMK preps is long gone. Slide shows on Powerpoint and Show Off can be integrated with text, sound, and music. There is no way to describe the experience of a professional presentation on gingival recession when it is accompanied by John Cage.

Please note that the above notes also apply to dermatology illustration, but with knobs on. Pulsating multi-coloured knobs...

Moom Pitchers - A Particularly Handy Small Hand

Our Video Lady, Melissa, has popped this on the blog desk with the note that it is a very good idea for videographers who are using DSLR cameras and want to mount a separate monitor screen or microphone. A still photographer might fancy mounting a flash unit at an odd angle to fire down on a macro subject. You could slip a doughnut over it in case you get hungry during the shoot.

The arm is 7" overall but you can also get them out to 11". The knob clamping the movement is smooth and positive - no creeping of the arm in operation. If you just need a particularly sturdy column up from the hot shoe, the articulated portion unscrews.

Best of all is the reasonable price:  $49.95.

Magic arm. Melissa-approved.

This Is No Reflection On You, But...

Have you ever seen those cans of dulling spray that studio photographers use to control reflections in silver or glass surfaces? It's sort of a thin waxy stuff that you can spray on then wipe off later. I forgot to take my can of it when I went to photograph the Jaguar XKS 120 at the car show. The alternative - a high screed of cloud - was inconvenient to arrange as I have not paid my account with the Meteorological Bureau. I still owe them for a rain storm in July and they won't give me any more credit...

I decided to be brave and take the picture anyway - I figured if the flash bouncing back was too strong the worst it could do would be to blast my clothes off and burn my face. In the event, nothing bad happened. The Jaguar is polished aluminium and seems to fire the light off into all directions - it is curved enough never to present a flat surface. I think it would be a nightmare for fingerprints but what a fabulous shape!

If you are confronted with a similar problem in your studio on a smaller scale, think of a light cube from Glanz or Promaster. These act as an overall shield from direct light and in themselves are a smooth white . You can do silverware, gold, or jewellery easily and you never have blown-out highlights.

Now when it comes to cars with metallic paint surfaces, you tend to get a different reflection - more spread-out but more problematical in some ways. It can be difficult to get the smear that you get back to register in the right place. The safest thing if you have a slab side or a flat plane that has metallic paint is to position it at an angle and shoot the main reflection out in another direction. I tried this with the Alvis.

Whether I succeeded or not is another matter - I suspect that someone may have been laughing at me while I worked...

Adjusting The Sun

Landscape photographers have a good deal in common with wedding photographers; they have to hike great distances hauling heavy equipment, their subjects that have impossible dynamic range, and they are never quite at peace with the weather.

The first problem can be addressed by simply employing native bearers or wives. They carry the tripod, gadget bag, 14 different lenses, and water bottles on their heads and you simply stride through the dripping jungle or the local council gardens with them in a long line behind you. A solar topee is not absolutely necessary but it makes a nice touch. It is wise to determine if the natives or the wives are friendly before you put the topee on...

The impossible dynamic range is a stiffer problem. Brides WILL insist on wearing white, or some variation of it. Grooms WILL wear black. You have to make the dress and the tux look good so sometimes you have to adjust the dynamic range of your camera to try to accommodate this. Just when you get enough detail in the two extremes you note that everything else has gone dull gray... Grit your teeth and post process it.

Adjusting the weather or the angle of the sun is not easy - even Joshua needed help doing that - but you can use the sun that is overhead to help you out. Remember that you don't just have one light source up there -you have two. The vast bowl of Western Australian blue sky is an immense fill light, but unfortunately biased in its colour temperature. You might have to retreat under a tree and get a polariser to remove the blue from the scene. You might have to overpower the sun with a close-range burst of light from a Canon or Nikon speed light.

You might have to get an assistant to shade your subject with a diffusion panel - here the wedding worker has the advantage as it is easier to shade a bride than Bluff Knoll. Remember that there are any number of HDR programs available as plug-ins for your computer and if you are prepared to explain to the bride why her complexion has come out
looking like that, you can get great effects in the bridal dress. Those of you who are booked for a lot of  brides and grooms on pebble beaches under a storm-wracked sky in Yorkshire may care to remember this. You'll be the darling of the English photo magazines...

Nothing To Do And All Day To Do It In

No, I'm not talking about the staff here at Camera Electronic nor am I aiming a dart at any of the customers. We all value leisure, but not enough of it will kill you dead and too much of it will kill you dead poor.

What we are on about is the business of setting your camera to do its own thing and then tootling off to leave it to the job. Time delay for one shot is available on nearly all cameras - you select the delay and press the go button and then scurry around to be in the thing. I do it all the time in the studio  - not just for selfies, but to allow a camera time to settle onto a tripod and yield steady results. Nothing new here.

Interval shooting is another thing altogether. We have all seen wonderful animations of flowers opening, clouds scudding across a sky, or investors besieging a ponzi financier's office. These are done by allowing the camera to take successive shots at spaced intervals. In the case of the flowers it can be quite a long interval between shots - the bank panic can be shot with small spacing between the exposures. Believe me, there will be motion...

Some cameras are equipped with interval timers themselves that can do this - I believe my Nikon D300 and 300s can do it. Other cameras can receive an electric signal from a separate timer that will trigger the shutter as long as there is battery power and memory available.

The time frame for this can be staggering - one timer I have in hand right now says that you can extend the recording time to 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds. With enough battery power for the camera - a separate issue - you get days of action in one sequence. This can be replayed on computers in the form of a video.

I've also been informed by a customer that there are other time-sequence machines upon which the camera may be mounted that will move the whole rig around during that interval - giving a view of many things happening all round the setup. I can't quite see that this would be controllable but it must be so.

One of our former staff members mentioned that he had been involved in a project at a building site setting up an automatic camera to record the month's-long process of erecting a structure. Apparently the limiting factor was the power supply to the camera.

Re-Volting Development - The Powered Menace

I don't wish to alarm you, but many of the cameras in use today contain electricity. Not a great deal, in some cases, but enough to cause concern in certain quarters.

The American Collection Of Concerned Physicians has called for the banning of all electricity - not only in photographic equipment, but in all aspects of life. They cite the troubles in Fukushima and point out that if the Japanese had been content to light their houses with rush lanterns they wouldn't be in the mess they are today. Of course, it is a little mean to scold people who have been caught up in a natural disaster, but the Collection has only their best interests at heart. And physicians scold good.

For the photographic-minded, the electronic camera is the norm today - very few of the mobile phones that people use to snap pictures have enough space for a roll of film. The amount of electricity needed varies as the size of the camera and the features increase. The compact battery is a small wafer that will shoot 200 shots - the big industrial macho camera needs a giant lithium-ion cell that shoots 2000 shots. You are encouraged to recharge these instead of throwing them away.

There are throw away lithiums, however. The Promaster people make a series of cylindrical ones that power older film cameras, light meters, and some accessories. they are the CR1/3N, the CR2, the CR123A, and any number of little flat button cells. These are good value in that they are lightweight for the electrical capacity. But there is a fatal flaw...

Many of the manufacturers of equipment that takes the flat button cells have decided upon slightly different sizes of battery - they all pretty much pump out the same voltage, but inevitably you never have the correct number for the customer's needs. As this is the International Week of Standards - like ISO and DIN and ASA and suchlike - I would like to call upon all right-thinking photographers to grab torches and pitchforks and march up the street to the camera designers and demand that they get their blinking act together.

Me? I'm currently converting my D300s to operate off a Leyden jar. As soon as I can perfect the biological CF card we should be free of the crushing rule of the big manufacturers...

Table Topple

I like table tops. You can take pictures on them, you can eat your dinner off them, and you can sleep on them after 18 bottles of beer. Actually, these days I can get there in 6, which means I can afford a pillow for the tabletop...I generally use a pile of old chip wrappings.

As photographic supports, however, they can leave something to be desired - mainly a backdrop behind your main subject. If you are doing pack shots or product photography you frequently need a bland or invisible backdrop so as not to encroach upon your subject. Herewith several suggestions:

1. Get a large sheet of cardboard from the newsagent or Jackson's art supply* and tape it to the front of the tabletop. Let it run back as far as you need for the subject to sit and then curve it up. Support it with a pile of books. Light the subject with $ 2000 worth of studio monolights or $ 1000 worth of speed lights and the pictures will look good. Light it with the sun and the pictures will also look good but you will have to contend with flies and wind.

2. Put your subjects inside a Glanz or Promaster light cube and light as before. The tent will shelter the subject but will itself catch the wind. Be cautious outside but don't be discouraged - many people light jewellery successfully with a light tent and a reflector and the Western Australian sunshine.

3. Promaster product table. Now you're talking. Attachment points for lighting supports and a translucent curved base - you can fire a flash up from below to eliminate shadows. Not expensive and folds out of the way. Our preferred product platform. in store now. No, you can't have the one on the floor because WE need it...we have more upstairs.

* Same cardboard but you can get Lotto tickets from the newsagent. And a smile.

First Tests On Promaster Paper

We reported the arrival of the new Promaster inkjet printing paper last week. When the place settled down on Friday we cranked two sheets of the Ultra Premium Metallic paper through the shop Epson 3880 to see what it was like.

Metallic paper is a bit of a fooler - you look at the surface straight out of the packet and it looks sort of dull - the silvery sheen can seem  a little grey in normal light. it is an illusion - turn the part to the light source and it flashes back.

So - the image size had to be adjusted in the printing program as these papers are the US Letter size - 8 1/2 by 11 inches. No real problem with Epson as there is a menu section that has all these sizes in a list - pick one and it will know what you want. As an aside, I was amazed that there should be such a variety of sizes all around a general theme...but then I reflected that there were no real sizes standards in the 1830-1890 period and studios just did whatever they thought was right...

Back to the paper. The images chosen were a southwestern water scene in colour and a Singapore cityscape in monochrome. both detailed and contrasty - they needed snap.

The recommendation on the net from Promaster re. Epson printers is that the high-speed option be turned off with this paper. It took about double the time for the printing but both images were delightful. Sharp, contrasty, good blacks and the highlights threw back the silver instantly. Glossy to the max - rather like the flashiest Epson papers.

We will open other sample packets and try other images on different surfaces. As it is, this one looks like a letter-sized winner.