Survivors: 6 Months /  by Sebastian Szyszka

"Parenting is the greatest..." - Every parent ever.

Anyone willing to trash their house for a silly photo idea is good in my book.

Laura and Avi asked me to shoot their daughter’s 6-month portrait. Luckily they were totally accepting of taking it in a different direction.

The dog loved it, for sure. We went through quite a bit of peanut butter to keep her in the right spot…

Almost Too Much Vintage /  by Sebastian Szyszka

Jeff and his 1967 Shoveled inside his dad's (still operating as a car shop) 1920's gas station.

That is Jeff. He's sitting on his custom 1967 Shovelhead. Inside his dad's 1920's gas station.

We've been talking about shooting him and his bike for almost a year. He always wanted to do a couple of shots in his dad's shop, but that was always going to be secondary to other shots. Until he sent me photos of the place. It would take a set stylist months to create this look. And it's just sitting there. Looking unbelievably awesome. All. The. Time.

I had the fortune of walking into it, setting up a couple of lights and taking a photo. All while trying to capture the layers of texture and history and story. My only regret was that Jeff's father wasn't there. Would have loved to get him in there for a frame or two.

Jeff Gilles: Instagram

View this photo on 500px or Flickr

X100T - Infrared Hot Spots /  by Sebastian Szyszka

I tested a range of apertures (f/2-f/8) to examine the quality of the IR hot spots I mentioned in my last post.

As you can see in the images below, the hot spots are present even wide open (as a loosely defined shift in color and brightness in the center of the frame) and become more defined as the aperture gets smaller. 

Though diffuse, the color shift is visible even at f/2. (Saturation pushed to 100% in Lightroom to help illustrate spots)

Spots are becoming more defined. (Saturation pushed to 100% in Lightroom to help illustrate spots)

From my limited experience so far, the spots are likely to have little impact on B&W shooters as a simple desaturation seems to eliminate the artifacts in many instances. 

Desaturation greatly reduces the artifacts and makes post cleanup much easier.

If left in color, the distribution, shape and variance in color across the spots make them challenging to remove in post. The X100T/R72 combo is not well suited to false color work to begin with (not sensitive enough to the visible spectrum to register usable variations in color) so I don't see many people running into this, but I feel I should mention it nonetheless. 

Hot spots can apparently be caused by reflections inside the lens barrel. Typically the interiors are designed to prevent visible reflections but don't take IR into account. There is a possibility that the filter adapter I'm using (cheap JJC) is contributing to the effect, I will try to find a way to test that and see if anything changes.

 

IR Experiments /  by Sebastian Szyszka

Trying new things.

FujiFilm X100T + Hoya R72 + Custom WB off grass.

Getting some hot spots at f/8 and f/11. Have to experiment some more to find ways of minimizing them, both during capture and in post. 

These were shot using hyperfocal distance, though AF works really well as long as there's enough light. 

Excluding Aperture Previews and Thumbnails from a CrashPlan Backup /  by Sebastian Szyszka

I've been avoiding adding my Aperture libraries to my CrashPlan backup sets because of the sheer number of files in the packages that don't need to be backed up. CrashPlan's memory use goes up with number of files and can increase the chances of crashing.

Luckily, CrashPlan allows the exclusion of files via regular expressions. Quick Googling unearthed an old post by Leigh McCulloch where he shares an expression for excluding thumbnails. By simply replacing "Thumbnails" with "Previews" I added a second expression to exclude those, as well.

A quick check in Crashplan's selection dialog confirms that the expressions work.

A quick check in Crashplan's selection dialog confirms that the expressions work.

The final expressions:

(.+).aplibrary/Thumbnails(.*)

(.+).aplibrary/Previews(.*)

Now I know next to nothing about regular expressions, so I'm sure there's a way to combine them. If there is, please share and I'll update. In the meantime, this works great.

UPDATE:

Shortly after posting this, @crashplan sent a helpful link to a knowledge base document explaining how they handle Aperture/iPhoto libraries and tips on backing them up and restoring them.