All posts by John Aldred

Senior editor at DIYPhotography.net, ASUS Brand Ambassador, photographer and geek.

3D Photogrammetry

I love how far along 3D software has come in the years since I last worked with it regularly.

Back then, Maya was still produced by Alias, and if you wanted such revolutionary features as particle, hair & cloth simulations that reacted realistically to real world physical principles, you were spending upwards of $5,000 just for the software, let alone the kind of hardware you needed to run it efficiently.

Now, such features are readily available to any and all through free Open Source software, like Blender (which has also come a hell of a long way since I first played with it way back when), and the hardware can be bought off the shelf at your local computer store to run it at a decent enough pace.

One of the aspects of 3D that I was always intrigued by was that of 3D scanning.

Continue reading 3D Photogrammetry

Photographing Grass

So, this was something very different for me.  The last time I was a part of the 3D world, I was still shooting film.  Digital cameras weren’t really that great, and online texture libraries were often prohibitively expensive for personal follies (at least if you wanted imagery of any kind of decent quality).

Yesterday, however, I spent the afternoon in the surprisingly glorious sunshine (It got to 19 degrees yesterday! in England! in October!) photographing blades of grass, leaves and various other bits and bobs in order to start compiling my own texture libraries for Blender and other 3D applications.

Continue reading Photographing Grass

Delving back into 3D

It’s been almost a decade since I last ventured into the world of 3D software like Maya, 3DS Max, etc. but suddenly I seem to have been bitten by the bug again.

It all started a few weeks ago when I was asked to give another talk at Lancaster Photographic Society on lighting portraits.

My plan was to sift through the images I already have in my library, and shoot a few more to explain specific lighting principles, and the differences that can happen when you add or take away a light here, or a reflector there.

Then, I stumbled across a post in the Strobist group on Facebook by Pat David, linking to a fantastic Blender 3D file he put together on his website, created specifically for the purposes of rendering out lighting tests – you can see one of mine in the header photo on this post. Continue reading Delving back into 3D

Smartphones – A Valuable Photographer’s Tool

“What’s in your bag?” seems to be an often asked question.

Typically, this question means “What do you have that I can lust after?” or “What do you have that isn’t as good as what I have?”, but it also has another connotation.

Of course, the gear is important, don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise, but it’s not about having “the best” camera, lenses or flash equipment, it just means you need the right ones for the task at hand.

But what about the other stuff?

There are so many things that, while not absolutely required, make life a whole lot easier during a shoot, and they’re often ignored when “the question” is asked.

I’m going to compose a series of posts that will attempt to address some of those things.  I suppose this could be considered “Part 1”, and I’m going to talk about some of the various ways my iPhone (but it applies equally to Android) has become an essential part of my kit.

Continue reading Smartphones – A Valuable Photographer’s Tool

DPI vs PPI and Why it matters (or not!)

This is a slight rework of a post I made on an old blog back in 2011, with a bit of an update to elaborate on a couple of points.

Originally this was in response to an article written by a particularly well known photographer claiming to “bust” some myths that his article actually end up reinforcing and propagating (which might explain why his post now seems to have magically vanished from the web).

I’d had a little back and forth on Twitter with this person regarding his new article and why PPI doesn’t matter when resizing images for digital display (meaning, on the screen, on the web, via digital projector running off a laptop, via a mobile device, whatever) which he claimed was a myth, and that it does matter.

Continue reading DPI vs PPI and Why it matters (or not!)

Assisting in the clouds

That’s “clouds”, as in, “those pretty white balls of fluffy stuff in the sky that are actually just big masses of static rain when you’re standing inside them”.

At some point around the middle of 2013, fellow photographer and good friend Graham Binns got in touch, as he does from time to time, to ask if I’d be interested and able to assist on a shoot.

I’ve assisted Graham before, a couple of times, and he’s assisted me in the past, too.  Whenever Graham and I get together, no matter who’s shooting, I know it’s going to be a fantastic day, we’re both going to come home exhausted, probably in a great deal of pain, and at least one of us will get wet.

So, of course, I said yes.

Continue reading Assisting in the clouds

Developing your own film

I started off in film and jumped wholeheartedly into digital back in 2002 when the Nikon D100 was released.

It was supposed to be a short break from film.  I’d always intended to return to it at some point and shoot the two side by side, but I was smitten by digital and it was a good 10 years before I finally pulled my Nikon N90s back out of retirement.

One thing I’d never done when I originally shot film was to develop and print it myself.  This is something I wanted to correct when I started again (prompted by the acquisition of a Nikkormat FTn for the princely sum of £1 at a local car boot sale).

Continue reading Developing your own film

Birds, Birds, more Birds and a Dog!

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of spending four and a bit days at the International Centre for Birds of Prey at Duncombe Park in Helmsley, Yorkshire.

I go to a number of game fairs and falconry fairs throughout each year, sometimes for work and sometimes for personal pleasure, but this one was a little something extra.  As well as being ICBP Duncombe’s first Raptor Fair, which looks set to become a great annual event, I was to photograph some of their display birds.

Of course, I photographed the birds during the displays themselves, as I often do at such events, darting about the arena and hopping from post to post, but I wanted to give them something a bit special.

arena_pano

Continue reading Birds, Birds, more Birds and a Dog!

What is “Sync Speed”?

Most people who use flash understand that your sync speed is the maximum shutter speed with which you can use flash.  What people generally don’t know is why.

“My camera goes all the way up to 1/8000th of a second, so why can’t I use flash past 1/250th?”

Well, this is really all down to how your shutter works in a DSLR.  The types of shutters in DSLRs are called “focal-plane shutters”.

Continue reading What is “Sync Speed”?