This blog is dead. Long live this blog!

Thing is I never realised when I started blogging how addictive it was going to be and how much I would want to do more on my blog.

And so I signed up for a free account with WordPress, but now I find that I want to do more things.

So I’ve changed very slightly to a more flexible version of WordPress and this means that there is a new address for blog – http://johnrochaphoto.net/

So, if you want to go on reading my blog. Please click here to take you to the new version.

It’s just the same the same posts and everything that you are familiar with, but it means that I can go on into the future with more interesting ideas.

So please, take just the second to click on the new blog

Update your bookmarks and feeds

I think this is going to be my last post on batteries for a while.

As I said, batteries are as boring as backup but batteries are equally essential.

Sometimes, of course, batteries hit the news:

I’ve just read that the United States Administration is banning Nickel Metal Hydride batteries and rechargeable cells on aeroplanes unless they are packed and carried in certain ways as they believe that there is a danger of fire, in particular, from low grade batteries made by companies that perhaps don’t have the highest manufacturing standards.

So that’s something to be concerned about because one of the great joys of digital photography is that you no longer have quite the same problems in going through airports and airport scanners.

The days when you tried to pack your films in lead lined bags, or tried to persuade recalcitrant and overworked airport security staff to let you take your films through in your hand luggage without going through the scanners – those days are gone.

But it seems in these very security conscious times in the travel business, that we now have battery problems.

But back to the batteries themselves as we’re talking about them.

The main problems regarding the types of rechargeable cells that we’ve talked about is that they might have memory problems, sometimes have environmental problems and also that they have a discharge problem: That is that after you charge them they quite quickly lose their power.

Another factor is that if you forget to charge them or wait until the last minute then it’s too late because you can’t immediately charge them even with the quickest chargers.

So, I’m going to come to the last type of cell for the moment which is based on Nickel Metal Hydride technology and is sometimes called a Ready to Use cell.

These types of cells are provided by a few companies and they have the following characteristics.

• When you buy them they are already charged so you can use them straight away

• When you charge them they keep most of their charge for a long time.

My photo show the brands I have used and I have found them to be the best type of cell for photographic purposes.

That’s it for the moment on cells. If you found this post interesting please comment or bookmark.

Next post I’m beginning to respond to previous comments and emails about macro photography so bye till then.

Kicking off with another macro shot – where’s the point of sharpest focus?

And so back to the batteries.

Nickel metal hydride batteries – (Ni-MH)

Most of my rechargeable cells now are of this kind and they do a great job from the photographic point of view – but they’re not perfect.

Nickel metal hydride batteries – (Ni-MH) have most of the characteristics of nickel cadmium cells, but with a number of improvements.

The main improvements are that they don’t have any toxic metals like cadmium, and they don’t suffer memory effects to the same extent.

This makes them the most widely used type of rechargeable AA and AAA cell today.

They still have one or two of the same difficulties as nickel cadmium cells.

They have the same 1.2 voltage and also a fairly high self-discharge rate. That is after charging, they can lose their energy quite quickly. This is worse in high temperatures.

This is particularly frustrating from the photographic point of view. There’s nothing worse than collecting the batteries you know you charged quite recently only to find they simply don’t have enough power and have to be charged again.

One lesser problem is that they can’t usually be charged quite as many times as Nickel Cadmium cells. Still recharging cells 500 times is still a great bonus in cost and environmental terms.

To summarize:

Against: They

have a nominal cell voltage of 1.2 v
self-discharge, i.e. lose energy after charging.

For: They

no longer use cadmium or other toxic materials
don’t have significant memory problems
are especially suited to high current drain applications like digital cameras and flashguns.

One point to watch out for is that they might need a dedicated charger

Again I’m going to start with a photo and it’s clearly a macro shot. And the reason is that I’m getting ready to respond to a comment sent in by Tony.

I did give him a quick reply to answer his immediate queries but it seems to me that they are of wider interest.

Lots and lots of photographers are interested in macro photography and realize that it’s a rather specialized and sometimes quite difficult area to deal with.

Right then let’s get straight back to the question of batteries.

And this time, let’s look at Nickel Cadmium cells.

Nickel Cadmium cells are still very widely available.

They are eminently usable and they have the most important characteristic from my point of view, that they are rechargeable.

They represent the earliest technology of rechargeable cells that is currently conveniently available and they have a number of plus points.

The best point for me is that they are excellent for certain purposes for example in flashguns, where they will recycle quite quickly.

Other advantages stem from being rechargeable – you can use them many many times saving both money and the environment.

In a way I’m just as excited about Nickel Cadmium cells as I was when they first came out – and as early versions were invented in Sweden in 1899 they’ve been around a long time.

However, they’re not the best choice of battery today.

One obvious problem is that they can suffer from memory effects. That is that every time you recharge them you can’t recharge them fully because they retain the memory of the previous charge.

There are ways around this – for example using chargers which discharge them completely first, but nevertheless it’s a problem to be clear about.

Another problem is that after being charged, they quite quickly lose their charge somewhat so that you can try to use batteries that you charged some time ago and find that a lot of the power has gone.

One final problem inherent in this kind of battery is that the voltage is 1.2 rather than 1.5 which can cause problems with some equipment. If you use 4 cells for example you will have 4.8 rather than 6 volts.

So my advice is that if you live in a part of the world where Nickel Cadmium cells are widely available at a good price and there are no obvious alternatives, then give them a go.

And if you already have cells in good condition, they may go on working. For myself I tend you use them in low priority equipment such as clocks rather than cameras.

The obvious problems is that modern cameras are completely battery dependent and are simply useless bit of metal and plastic junk without batteries.

So to sign off, Nickel Cadmium cells are worth looking at but there are better, more modern alternatives available and we’ll go to them another time.

If you have an interest in this post, please leave a comment and if you subscribe to my feed you’ll get immediate updates.

Ok so starting a post on batteries with a photo may seem irrelevant but hey I promised to post some of my favourite pictures as we went along and the point of batteries is that they’re like computer backups – absolutely essential.

It’s when you need them and don’t have them that the going really gets tough.

And these days. If you have no juice, you get no photos.

It’s as simple as that.

Anyhow this picture is in response to a request I got about selection – that is creating new photo-composites by cutting out parts of a photo and using them with other foreground or background objects.

Like most photographers I’ve had several tries at getting this right and there are lots of different approaches.

Still for this picture I used the pen tool and I’m convinced it’s worth the learning curve.

And so to batteries… Yes they may not be sexy but they’re so essential. Even though I use a DSLR and a compact that have special dedicated batteries there’s still a need for AA and AAA size cells.

A quick trawl through by gadget back and studio show at least these:

• 6 AA cells for the battery grip for my Canon 350D – some people like the grip just from the balance point of view but I’ve got pretty small hands so prefer to shoot without. Still I try to make sure it’s ready in case I need it and of course some sort of battery of this size can be obtained almost anywhere
• 4 AA cells for my Canon Speedlite 430EX flashgun
• 2 AAA cells for my radio controlled flash trigger

And that’s just a quick trawl.

So batteries this size are easy enough to find but there’s a bewildering array of non-rechargeable and rechargeable cells around.

Battery technology has changed lot in my time so I’ve been trying to update my knowledge as I go along.

Now I personally don’t use non-rechargeable batteries much and I’ve never tried the current Lithium cells so when I do use a non-rechargeable I’ll choose an Alkaline Cell:

Alkaline cells have some good and bad points:

Good:

• They’re readily available even in quite obscure locations
  The have a good shelf life, so they’re usually in good condition and have full power
  They deliver the full 1.5 voltage
  They’re quite cheap for a one use battery
  They don’t need chargers

Bad:

• They don’t always provide the right kind of power – i.e flashgun ready times can be quite long
  They don’t last very long in heavy duty conditions
  They are very, very expensive if you use them often

And

Most of all for me they are an environmental disaster as they all have to be thrown away somewhere

So, my recommendation is: Only use alkalines if there’s no other choice

As I said, there are some pictures, which I consider to be both personally satisfying and which have been good stock sellers. So I thought I’d better give an example.

I mentioned, the question of travel photography and of travelling in so-called exotic locations before.

I suppose one of the places that I’ve been to, which I have found to be the most photogenic and the most rewarding is Oman.

I lived in Oman and on and off for about five years and a combination of the beauty of the scenery and the good-natured people made for a truly satisfying experience.

Now one of the most fascinating areas of Oman is in Dofar in the south of Oman centred around the region capital of Salalah. This is a really mystical land, where you can well imagine following in the footsteps of the Queen of Sheba, in landscape, that seems unchanged since the dawn of time.

Of course since then, it is Islam that has shaped Oman and its culture and Heritage and driving through Dofar, I came across the tomb of Bin Ali an Islamic sage and holy man who died in 1135 AD.

I took many photos of this tomb, which is a fine example of mediaeval and Islamic architecture.

In a wonderful and dramatic landscape, this is the image that I finally made.

This image has sold well, both as a stock photo and to the photographic media. It was published for example, in Practical Photography, where the editor at the time. William Cheung, e-mailed me with the comment, “Nice one John”.

Now this may seem like a standard image, but it is in fact, a composition of two images merged together combining an image of the tomb and the sky taken on a stormy day which I shot specially for this photograph.

As I said in previous posts there is a long history of photographers combining many images to make a new one, but it still causes a furore.

A reader to Practical Photography wrote complaining about my image.

She said that I had taken two bad pictures and made one bad picture from them. Her main complaint, it seems was that the sky did not fit the foreground. In other words, the meteorological content was poor.

As I have said before, I always make it clear when I have manipulated a picture so I have nothing to hide, but nevertheless, it seems that this type of composition is still controversial in spite of this.

Or perhaps because of this.

This picture has been well received on the stock market, and I think it may continue to sell well. I’d be very happy to hear your opinions on this topic.

And now as they say something completely different…

I always like to respond to e-mails and comments and a little while ago I was asked for some buying advice on digital cameras.

As I’m not an expert on all the cameras on the market today I gave some example of review sites.

Perhaps within my area of experience, it was clear that batteries were going to be an important issue, and I believe that batteries are a vital accessories for photographers today.

I personally regret this as I worked for most of my pre-digital career with completely manual cameras, such as my Bronica which needed no batteries at all.

Still in a digital world. Batteries are important, so I thought, my views on batteries, might be of wider interest.

The point here I think is that like many other photographers, I’m fascinated by certain themes or leimotives in my photography and one of my recurring preoccupations is with shadows.

This was brought to me again quite recently as I was walking down a street in Rome, Italy and the sun was shining over the awning of a shopfront and then the sun disappeared for a moment and the whole scene was transformed, all the borders, dark areas, all the three dimentional aspects disappeared all I was left with was a whitish wall and a rather tawdry awning.

This emphasized again to me how fleeting shadows are and of how connected they are with the literal interpretation of photography as “painting with light”.

It’s also connected to the days when I used to practice non-camera photography. Because of course when you’re interested in photography personally you don’t have to bother about the types of technical restrictions imposed by a number of commercial agencies and clients. You can shoot pictures on plastic lens cameras, on Lomos, you can use pin hole cameras which you’ve made yourself and if you set things up properly you don’t need a camera at all.

But, once you get into stock photography, editorial photography or advertising photography or any photography where there’s a client, you have to meet the client’s demands. Some clients these days are extremely undemanding which is causing trouble in the world of commercial photography because many people now are looking for free or low cost photographs and they don’t necessarily have any understanding or care of what good pictures are.

So, the first photo I’m going to look at in detail is of the shadow of a light in my kitchen. I think I said before that I like to get up early and in this case I was standing making a cup of tea when I saw that the early morning sun had come through my window and made an image or shadow of my kitchen light on a cupboard door. It was a graphic pattern but then it clouded over and all was lost.

I waited two or three days and at last I was rewarded by a similar pattern of sunlight. I’d already decided to take the photo, if you like, in two parts because in this particular picture I wanted to emphasize total symmetry. This doesn’t mean of course that I think there’s some rule about symmetry or that symmetry is in itself a good thing, I just felt that it suited the pattern here.

Also I felt that by using this technique I could make a picture with a much higher pixel count and therefore a better quality of definition than by shooting the whole thing. In other words what I did was I used a medium telephoto setting on my 80-200 zoom lens to take only one half of the shadow.

Later in the computer I created a separate layer for the image, increased the canvas, made a duplicate of this half and then flipped it over and then gradually joined the two halves together until I had made a composite of the two identical halves – in other words, a mirror image.

Now this is what I consider to come in the ‘personal’ pictures category. I don’t have any obvious view of whether it would sell as a stock picture. It certainly hasn’t yet, but it might. So this is the sort of picture I might take largely to please myself and with what you might call the artistic part of me.

Now when it comes to stock pictures it’s like a lot of things. The world is full of very good photographers who go for one reason or another to what some people think are exotic places – of course not necessarily exotic to the people who live there. Exotic only to the sort of people who look at and buy pictures.

And this means that what you might call the travel area of stock photography is incredibly overcrowded. I think I can say that I’ve been around the world quite a bit.

I’ve lived and worked in and visited several countries in Europe, Asia and Arabia and I can say that many of the pictures that I’ve taken in these countries sell.

As I live in Bulgaria I find that I can do better than most European based photographers for this particular country and there is some interest in it.

MayDay dancers in Sofia

So I’ve taken a steady stream of pictures near to home and of course it’s the case that if you live in any other country you can do the same.

I find that pictures of Britain sell pretty well as well.

Buckfast Abbey in Devon

However it does seem to me quite important to create what you might call a more niche based approach – pictures which perhaps many people would consider hardly worth taking.

For this reason I’ve taken a number of pictures which a lot of people might think of as boring or ugly or perhaps simply unpictorial if there is such a word and an example is the picture of a cockroach.

This is a picture which needs a certain degree of expertise and suitable equipment.

I took this picture on the kitchen balcony of my house in Ibra in Oman and this type of cockroach – though some people say they’re not cockroaches – are plentiful over there coming largely through the vents in the air conditioning system.

If you find the need to change your air conditioner you might find yourself with a very large number of these beasts.

Perhaps the obvious point with stock photography is that provided the technical requirements are met, somewhere there’s a market for a picture of just about anything that you can see in the world today and it doesn’t necessarily have to capture the excitement of your heart or you mind.

Quite lot of people have expressed an interest in stock photography. So I think for my next post I might have a look at a picture or pictures which have been successful in stock terms and have appealed to me personally.

I started my photo website before I started blogging and understandably quite a few people contact me through my site and I’ve just realised there are a number of differences in the sorts of questions that people ask.

I suppose it might be because my site is clearly divided into photographs which are personal and for stock photography.

Now of course it may seem a bit strange in a way that I’ve had little to say about stock photography in particular but one or two people have asked me have asked me about stock photography and also what is the difference between what I might call my personal work and stock work.

Of course in many cases there isn’t any difference. I just love photography and many of my favourite personal pictures have turned out to be good stock sellers.

Nevertheless there is a difference in some cases and so I thought I might try to show some pictures every now and then which would show the particular aspects of my personal and stock photography.

As far as stock photography is concerned I’ve been involved in stock photography for a long time. The first stock agency I worked with was the Keith Jones Picture Library. Now as far as I can see this doesn’t exist any more. For a while I was with Barnabys and interestingly this turned up when I was looking for something quite different and I think it’s incorporated into the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Another agency was called the Northern Picture Library and as far as I can see it’s also disappeared and the name is used by a pop group which shows just how things have changed. For some time I was with the Freelance Photographers Guild in New York which I think has probably been incorporated into Getty.

This just shows how the stock photography business has gone up and down partly as agencies tried to move or perhaps not to move into the digital age. I had my fingers burnt very badly with an agency which accepted transparencies and changed them into digital works.

At the moment I’m with two all digital agencies. I’ve been a few years now with Alamy which is an interesting operation – I might have something to say about that – quite a lot of photographers are interested in an agency that has no internal formal editing procedure, and I’ve also recently joined an agency called Photoshelters.

I might comment on this in the future. This is an agency with editors and so far they seem happy enough with the small sample I have given them.

As far as the stock market is concerned it’s changing very very rapidly. So many pictures are used now online in websites and blogs and these pictures don’t have to be as large as pictures for print because of the nature of computer screens and the need to show quickly. people get very bored waiting for pictures to load.

Also a lot of people today have digital cameras.

Partly my thinking is coloured by the fact that when I started out in stock photography it was considered that the minimum equipment was a medium format camera using either colour transparency film for slides on the light box or monochrome film for black and white prints.

This meant two largish cameras or one camera with interchangeable backs. So I bought into the Bronica system – I still have my Bronica, backs and lenses. I’ve taken them to the top of Macchu Picchu and along the Silk Road and on various other journeys. Sadly, Bronica is no more the last models coming in 2005.

But it all means that when photographers look at pixel count and point out that the Canon range includes cameras with 21 mega pixels it’s still all in comparison with the traditional 35mm camera when they compare quality.

When you’re accustomed to the quality of medium format it’s a bit of a shock to work with cameras that have 8 or 12 pixels though it’s important to remember that the type of picture produced with a digital camera is different in all sorts of ways.

The problem for her seemed to be how the flash could fire at the right time when the flash and the camera were not connected. We seemed to back in the era of flash powder when the the photographer would uncap the the lens manually and ignite the powder.

This got me thinking. It is a sort of magic and it also emphasizes some of the facts about my working methods.

Before I went digital I used cameras from Yashica, Rollei, Zenza Bronica and Konica which all had an outlet for a flash cable. Beastly things they were too with wires getting in the way and the contacts often failing.

Of course many cameras are still produced with flash contacts for external guns but as I mentioned before light weight is important to me so I bought a Canon D350 SLR without an external contact – though of course it has a flash shoe.

As an added problem it seems that many modern electronic cameras do not like the high trigger voltages produced by many flashguns manufactured in previous years.

I wanted to be able to use all the flashguns I possessed including my old Colorflash 100 studio light which must be over 20 years old now and has no sophisticated controls but does the job of producing light.

Anyway I looked around and it seemed my best option for off camera flash was to use some sort of flash trigger. I had some idea about these and had already realised that some were based on infra-red and some on radio technology.

For my purposes I decided against infra red as with this technology you need a clear path between the receiver and transmitter. With radio technology there can also be problems as the flash can be fired from other sources using radio transmission. So nothing’s perfect.

Anyway, here in Bulgaria where I live there’s not the same range of photo equipment available as in some other European countries and so I decided to see what I could find in the UK.

Just by chance I came across a company called studioflash.co.uk who advertise on the internet.

I’d better say now that I had no prior contact with this company so I was astonished with what followed.

I decided to buy a unit called MiniMagic which seemed to be inexpensive and simply made.

I ordered online but at some point the order failed – probably – because the payment system was not available in Bulgaria at that time.

I emailed studioflash.co.uk with my problem and was surprised at the response.

The guy who emailed me – was it Ray? I can’t remember now said, “I can see you’ve entered the details in my system so I’ll send you the unit and you just send me a cheque when you get it”.

That’s what I call service. I received the unit safely and sent the cheque promptly – it was the least I could do.

Now none of this matters if the unit doesn’t work but it does. Here it is.

The construction is lightweight and there’s no lock on the foot but I haven’t found these points a problem.

Bottom line is, provided the two AAA batteries are fresh the unit does the job. I use it connected directly to my Chinese built studio flash and have slave units on other flashes I use at the same time.

It’s great to have a reliable system without trailing wires so I strongly recommend you give this or a similar unit a try.

Update – I see on the website there are new units with a more rugged construction and a choice of channels.

Of course this deals with how to get a flash working these days. But the central question is, why use flash? What are the special qualities of flash as a light source and how best to use it. That’s for another time.

Just in case it’s not clear what I mean it’s when I take an original image and then taking only half of that image flip it over to provide a symmetrical image by joining the two halves.

So why should we do this?

there are a number of reasons and I’m planning to have a look at some of them in posts to come.

Some reasons are aesthetic and some are technical.

One more thing is that this is a technique that refines as time goes by and results in a whole range of unique images.

I came upon this idea quite by chance in my pre digital days. Clearly though it’s possible to print images like this mostly it depends on digital manipulation.

Here’s how it started for me.

It was in the 1970s and I was staying in Munich, one of Germany’s finest cities. I decided to try to get a view over the Olympic park by climbing to the top of the Olympic tower at night.

It was cold and windy and I just hoped my tripod – a Slick 88 – was sturdy enough for the job. At the time I was using a Konica Autoreflex with a 70-150 mm Tamron zoom lens with separate zoom and focus rings.

Looking over the parapet I saw the illuminated building of the BMW works, one of the landmarks of Munich, with its tower built like the cylinders of a car engine.

I took several shots and then decided to try some in camera long exposure zoom shots.

I’m assuming many photographers will understand this technique but in a nutshell what happens is that you zoom the lens from wide to tele or tel to wide at the same time as giving a long exposure. This technique is easier with a two ring zoom as there’s less chance of shifting the focus.

Anyway I was pleased with some of my images and decided to work on this technique.

The day came when I decided to make the move to digital imaging – originally by scanning my films.

I bought a Minolta scanner and suddenly I found I was able to manipulate my images in ways that were impossible before.

Here’s one of the resultant images.

What had started out as a record shot of a cityscape at night became an abstract image.