The Pocket Wizard Pre-Trigger

Back in February, I promised to put up a review of the Pocket Wizard Pre-Trigger. I had just bought one and wanted to give it a test out.

Though I’ve been super busy and haven’t had a chance to use this thing much, the perfect opportunity presented itself recently. Spring has a good grip on northern Colorado. The flowers are blooming, the weather is warming up, grass is getting green, and the birds and insects are starting to come out in droves.

A few days ago we put up a few bird feeders with hopes that we could attract a few visitors. Boy did we ever! I tried to get some pictures of those birds, but they wouldn’t come around with me standing there. What ever would I do? Yep, this trigger came to mind instantly.

First off, I should mention that the trigger that came for my Canon 20D doesn’t look like the one pictured (from the PW web site). The little box is much smaller, with just a tiny switch with a “I” and a “O” symbol.

Bird brains shows up to drink

First up was the hummingbird feeder. I set up my tripod, mounted the camera with my Sigma 70-300mm lens, and positioned the whole setup about 5 feet from the feeder with the lens set out to 300mm. I got a focus on the feeder where the bird would be (this particular bird always goes for one side), and set the lens autofocus switch to manual.

Tripod mounted, lens set to 300mm

The trigger doesn’t come with much instruction to speak of. The most important thing to know about this trigger is that there are two switch positions: “I” and “O”. Think of one as holding down the shutter button half way. When you switch it on, the camera will get a focus lock (if set to AF), and wait for a trigger. The moment you press the shutter, there will be no lag. If you have the switch set the other way, when you trigger the remote, it will first attain a focus (if AF is turned on), then take the picture. This explains why I set the focus up then set the switch to manual focus. I turned the switch on the trigger to “half way” I’ll call it. This way, when I trigger the camera, there will be no lag whatsoever.

I went in the house and waited. I couldn’t see the camera, but I could see the feeder. With my other Pocket Wizard in hand, as soon as the bird showed up, I started pushing the button like crazy. I ended up walking away with a few decent pictures that would have been impossible without a wireless trigger.

If I were to do this again (which I will), I’d set up a flash to really accentuate the bird. I’ll post those when I get around to it.

Next up was our finch feeder. This thing is seeing some serious action. At times we have 8-10 birds all duking it out for some seed.

This time I decided to go a little wider. I set up the tripod about 15 feet away and had the same lens, but set to 70mm. Got my focus, composed the shot, and went inside. 20 seconds later the birds showed up and I snapped a few photos.

70mm

I then went back outside and recomposed the shot at 300mm. Went inside and got a few more.

300mm

Unfortunately it was evening and I couldn’t get the shutter speeds I wanted to really freeze the motion. But that’s okay, I’ll try again. Bumping up the ISO would have done the trick, but I was okay with a little motion blur over some noise.

One thing to note about this trigger. When the switch is set to “shutter half way” mode, you can rapid fire the shots. However, just like if you had your finger on the shutter, an image won’t show up on the LCD. You have to turn off that switch and the image will show up, even if it’s been a long time since your last image. Also, because cameras keep priority on the shutter when the button is halfway pressed, know that the images will not write to the card (or will write at a slower rate with a lower priority). So your camera’s buffer may fill up after a handful of images.

When I first got this trigger, I ran out to take some pictures of the sky. I thought that the ability to trigger the camera without touching it would be cool. I was a little frustrated at why the image wouldn’t show on the LCD until it occurred to me what was happening.

So, my overall impressions of this trigger are simply that it’s awesome. It has enabled me to get some photographs that I wouldn’t be able to get without it. This $80 trigger is a LOT cheaper than a $12,000 600mm lens. Sure, I can’t be at the camera, but at least I get the shot. I can also start taking photos of my family with me in it, and don’t have to break an ankle stumbling over rocks to beat the self timer. To me, that’s worth 80 bucks right there.

And don’t even get me started on the distance I can go from the camera thanks to the Pocket Wizard’s amazing range. I haven’t even tested that yet with my flashes.

Have you tried this trigger? What did you think? Drop a comment.

One of the (many) things that differentiates pro shooters from hobbiests is that the pro shooter is always ready to capture that great shot. They don’t turn off their camera whenever they’re not actively shooting. They leave that lens cap off. They keep their finger near that shutter. And they keep looking for a photo op. After all, you never know when life will happen. If you’re not ready, you’ll miss the shot.

But this is an easy one for the amateurs to remedy.

A few weeks back we were commissioned to do a family portrait session for some friends of friends. We decided to make an afternoon of it and did some BBQing. We brought along our son (since we were also hanging out).

During the afternoon we spent half an hour or so in the backyard taking family photos. The little guy didn’t want any part of the family posed shots. So when we were done, we let mom and dad go inside and have a beer.

We stayed in the backyard and let the little guy play and have fun. As usual, he quickly forgot that I was chasing him around with a camera. We ran around and played guns (light stands make fantastic bazookas), and all was right in his world. I was happy because we went home with a big handful of photos that we were happy with. Mom and dad were too.

Up until this point everything went as planned. We were done shooting, got some great photos, and were just hanging out letting the little guys play. As soon as my wife let our son go to play, he made a bee line for our photo subject and laid a big hug on him. This moment literally lasted two seconds, because my son was off again and moving toward something else, probably a bug or a leaf or a blade of grass. Who knows.

Lucky for me I was ready for anything. Though we were done shooting, I left the camera turned on, the lens cap was in my pocket, and my finger was at the shutter. All I had to do was raise the camera to my eye, grab a quick focus, and snap the photo. I thought, “Hey, that’ll be cute” and moved on without a second thought.

We went back home and looked at the photos from the day. This one turned out to be our favorite. It was a favorite of the family we were there to shoot too. We even got a big print made up and displayed it at our booth at a local children’s festival. Countless people commented on this photo above all others in our portfolio.

These photos were taken with my Canon 20D fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens (I love this cheapo lens). Color and contrast adjustments were made in Lightroom.

So if you want to increase the number of keepers you shoot, a good place to start is being ready more. You’ll be amazed at how your photography will improve.

Screenshot of PicLens viewing one of my Picasa albums.

This one has been floating around the photo blogs for several days now. I’ve largely ignored this one lately since I’ve been just too dang busy to care.

But today I read Thomas Hawk’s review, “PicLens: The Most Beautiful Way to Browse Photos on the Web“. In his review he says, “PicLens is hands down the best I have ever seen photos look online.”

You know what? Thomas ain’t pullin’ yer leg. It really is the best way I’ve ever seen photos displayed online.

I finally downloaded this small and simple to install plugin for Firefox browsers. I was instantly blown away. The interface reminds me of what I’ve seen of the iPhone’s photo browser. I’ve only tested it out with my Flickr and Picasa collections, and it works flawlessly. The interface is fast and smooth, and the really great thing is that you can cruise through someone’s entire photostream without having to wait for the page to load or having to click on individual photos to see larger versions. You just click, drag the interface, and photos load smoothly in the background. Want to see a photo bigger? Just click it and it instantly enlarges. Need it even bigger? Double click and it goes full screen.

If you’re into photos (you’re reading this right?), then DO NOT WAIT ANY LONGER to download this plugin. Do it now! NOW!

Simply breathtaking.

Download PicLens here. Told them I sent ya, they’ll let you download a free copy.

If you’re a Borat fan, you caught on to my title immediately.

Since moving to Colorado on New Years day, we’ve been busy doing lots of things that don’t involve our portrait business. For the most part, these activities have names like “hiking” and “snowshoeing”.

But a few weeks back we decided it was time to get back on the bandwagon and get our business moving again. But now that we’ve moved to another state, all of our referrals are toast. Since it’s much harder to win new customers than to cultivate existing ones, we knew we had our work cut out for us.

Then an idea struck. We had never done any trade shows/home shows/festivals before. It just so happened that a children’s festival would be coming up soon, and vendor booths would be part of the festival. We plunked down our $25 entry fee, bought a $150 awning at Sams Club, a table and chairs, had a banner printed, and put together some materials and displays for the booth. The total cost for our booth was around $300.

The festival lasted four hours, but the bulk of our activity took place during the last two hours. During that time we booked 12 sessions and had commitments for about a half dozen others. It’s safe to say our investment for the booth was paid for that day.

We found that there was a huge advantage to being exposed to so many families. All of our samples were there laid out for prospective customers to see. We even ran a show special that included a session and several prints at a discount, if they booked their session that day.

Having a booth at a festival was easily the most effective method we’ve yet tried for drumming up new business. Have any of you dear readers tried this sales tactic? Did it work? Drop a comment and let us all know your experiences.

Pretty much since I first laid eyes on the Pocket Wizard radio triggers, I’ve wanted to get the camera trigger so that I could take pictures without standing behind the camera or using the timer.

Then I had a baby. Any idea how hard it is to get a decent family photo with a bobble head kid and a ten second timer? I need something where I can be in the photo, and snap the shutter with the same response time as if I were looking through the viewfinder. As an owner of a Canon D30 and a Canon 20D, there is no included wireless trigger like some of the cheaper models such as the Digital Rebels.

Then I moved to Colorado, and realized I wanted to get some family photos while high up in the mountains on the trails, with no one in sight to take a photo for me. To complicate matters, I hike with my 30 pound son on my back, in snowshoes. Trying to hit the shutter button and quickly get in position in deep snow while weighed down is an interesting maneuver to say the least. I’m sure I resemble a water buffalo on roller skates.

So I bought the pre-trigger. It was delivered a couple of days ago and I have done some very limited testing on it. Soon I’ll take it for a real spin. So far I love it, but have learned a couple of things that I can tell you if you buy one to help you out.

So keep your eyes peeled for the review if you have any interest in this product. And if you don’t but own Pocket Wizards, I just might convince you to get one.

I had the day off yesterday, so my wife and I took a drive up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a little snowshoeing. It was a nice sunny day, but the wind was howling.

We hiked up to Nymph Lake and took some photos there. At left is me standing out on the ice. I’m not really sure how thick it was, but it was thick enough that I couldn’t see all the way through the ice.

Nymph Lake was about a mile from the parking area. We decided we wanted a longer hike and wanted to see more of the park’s beauty, so we headed further up the mountain to Dream Lake. On the trail, we stumbled upon this beautiful scene. We were totally off the trail now, and were blazing through thigh deep powder. It was awesome.

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Once we finally arrived at Dream Lake about another mile past Nymph Lake in deep powder, the wind was blowing 60-80 miles per hour. It was brutal. We wanted to go further to the next lake, but just couldn’t take the pounding blowing snow. So we quickly snapped off a few photos, and headed for the shelter of the trees. Here are a few of the photos we came away with.

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It feels like ages since I’ve been able to put up a decent post on this blog. It’s been well over a month now since I was even able to post any photos to the web. But the good news is that our satellite internet service was installed on Thursday and we’re back online. To show all you readers how important you are, you get to see the first pictures posted online since we moved to Colorado.

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Here are three photos taken around our house. We live in an amazing place known as Poudre Canyon. Poudre Canyon follows the Cache La Poudre river for many miles out of the Rocky Mountains and out to Fort Collins. The name is French, and it means “hiding place of the powder”, so named because during the 1800’s French trappers used the canyon to hide their gunpowder after getting trapped by a snowstorm. Today there are a few hundred people who live along the river. While it’s currently frozen over (more pictures of that to come), during the spring and summer the river is a big destination for white water rafters and is said to be world class fly fishing waters.

The picture you see here at left is the view looking down at the river and road from our deck. This is the amazing view I get to look at every morning while I eat my corn flakes before heading to work. Speaking of heading to work, our driveway is 1/2 miles long down to that road. It’s the steepest drive I’ve ever seen, and after it snows it turns to ice. In my truck I typically just slide all the way to the bottom. It’s really a semi-controlled slide more than a drive really. My wife lost control on the driveway a few weeks back and will no longer leave the house after it snows until the driveway clears. It’s fun…

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Here’s the house. Two main levels with a finished basement. Is it me, or does it look like the guy who built this place spent a really long time playing with Lincoln Logs when he was a kid? You can’t really tell from this distance, but most of those logs are two feet or more in diameter. Some are three feet. Those logs are huge!

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And despite the hardships of living up here, this is what makes it all worth while. Even though I have to get out on the tractor and plow the driveway for an hour every time it snows, we can throw on our jackets and snow boots and walk out the front door for a wilderness hike any time we want. Here’s me and my boy a few nights ago after work. It was a lovely warm day so we thought we’d take a little hike. Wouldn’t you hit the woods if it was 25 degrees outside? I learned something on that hike: a 30 pound toddler on your back and the thin air at altitude don’t mix so well. I guess it’s time to get in shape.

More to come…I’m off to take a little hike now.

Good news! We’ve put our order in for satellite internet service at our mountain Colorado home. No more dial up! I’m not sure yet when they’ll come out to install, but I’m hoping to have high speed internet service running in the next few days. When that happens, I’ll be back to posting articles and photos.

Can you imagine how it feels to a photographer to have to resize his pictures down to a tiny little thumbnail just to email them? How did we all survive before broadband? I mean seriously!

So, if you’ve been paying attention, I had wild and crazy dreams of taking my family and moving from sunny, warm, humid Texas to cold, snowy Colorado. After two long weeks of moving and getting settled in, things are finally calming down. Allow me to hit a few of the highlights from our move, in case you’re interested:

• Loading up the moving truck takes three days, not the one as expected.
• We get to Colorado, crash with my brother, and immediately all three of us get the flu. For bonus points, he has week old twin preemies at home. Not a good place for the flu to hang out. We leave and head to a hotel.
• We get up to our new home, a gorgeous log cabin in the foothills, and have to plow the road to get to the house. Upon arrival we scope out the road in my two wheel drive truck. I proceed to drive it into a ditch. I now know another use for that tractor other than plowing snow. Tire chains become a part of my daily life.
• My dogs get into a fight with each other from being couped up too much, roll down a steep ravine, and are hurt so badly they both have to be put down.

Whew, and that’s just the highlights! There were many other things that went wrong during this move. But now that things are calming down, I can honestly tell you that it’s all worth it. This place is absolutely amazing, and I love it more and more with each passing moment. As I type this I’m looking down on the frozen Cache La Poudre river from 28 acres of Rocky Mountain wilderness. There are bear, mountain lion, fox, and deer tracks everywhere in the snow out the front door. I would include a picture here, but for the moment I’m on dial up. Can you believe that even exists anymore? The only internet option here is satellite, and I’m looking into it.

The bottom line is that we’re here, things are calming down, and you’ll start seeing articles coming soon. I’ll pick back up with the Portrait Lighting For Beginners series too.

Cheers!

Allow me to share an experience I had from a recent portrait session. My wife and I shot a family in Austin back in early November. The little boy was 15 months old and walking just fine. Typically, when we photograph children that are older than newborns, we like to at least incorporate some outdoor settings into the shoot. Since we have a photojournalist style of photography, we decided to make the focal point of the session a playground where the family could play and we could capture the fun.

Let me start by saying that shooting people on swings is really difficult. Sure if they’re not moving then everything is great. But focusing on a target that is moving back to front is an acquired skill. Autofocus is out. Manual focus is the only way. I like to find a focus point, stand still, and wait for the person to swing through that depth-of-field and try to hit the shutter at precisely that moment. It works pretty well, but I still toss out about 30 percent of the shots because the focus is off. The wider the aperture, the harder this gets. Too bad I like wide apertures…

Then there was this shot. I don’t remember what I said, but it made all three bust out laughing. I’ve learned that to get that one great shot, sometimes you just have to go for it and the technical stuff be damned. There was no time to refocus; the moment would have passed. So I shut up and took the picture. The focus is off and the whole shot is soft.

When we were going through the shots from the session, we almost tossed this photo because of the focus. Instead, we recognized it as a capture of a family’s fun moment with a technical flaw. We decided to keep the photo and present it to the clients. Turns out they loved it. It ended up being one of the featured images in a custom designed 8×10 inch press printed book we made for them. Once they saw it, they ordered five copies as Christmas gifts. This made me especially happy I just took the picture.

So the moral of the story? You can pick apart your images from a technical standpoint all day long. You can put them on forums and let others shoot them down. But don’t forget to look beyond focus, white balance, and other details at what the photo really says. Sure, you should strive for technical perfection, but don’t let it hinder you. If I put this photo on a forum, it would probably be shredded as a horrible failure. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, because the clients loved it, and bought lots of them.

The post-processing on this image was done in Lightroom and Matt Kloskowski’s “Vintage New York” preset was applied to get the unique color scheme. You can get the preset over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.