Jeff Hoy, American

OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!OMG!!!

I took these photos of a couple of my R/C cars earlier today for a project I’m working on.  I thought they turned out so cool that I just had to share them.  The first two are my mid-90′s era Kyosho Pureten GP Nostalgia series chassis topped with an HPI Pontiac Firebird Trans Am body in racing trim.  The third photo is my early 90′s era Team Losi JRx-Pro restoration project that’s still kind of a work in progress, even though I’ve run it a couple times as you can see from the dirt that the bottom of the A-arms are coated with.  I should have cleaned it before taking these pictures.

These were shot in a darkened room with my camera mounted on a tripod.  I was using my zoom telephoto 100-400 f/4-5.6 L lens at 300mm f/16.  I set my exposure to 6 seconds and then took my Speedlite and manually popped it three or four times for each photo from different positions and angles.  The black surface and background was made up of my glass entertainment center top and a pillowcase stretched behind the cars.  I did some minor alterations in photoshop, mostly turning the black levels down to get a good match between the backdrop and the table surface.  I also upped the saturation a little to make the blues pop a bit more.  Looking at them now I should probably go back and clean up some of that dust that is showing on the table.

Scott Bourne must love getting hate mail.

I’ve conducted some polls on a variety of social media sites and here on Photofocus.com.

I’ve taken into account all the answers and based this post on those results, plus my own experience and observation.

So without further ado, here are my picks for Cameras of the Year – 2009.

…that most “security” guards were just people that were too stupid to pass the police academy and probably would have failed a psychological exam anyway.

555 California security guards in San Fran threaten to punch sidewalk photographer, break his f*cking camera – Boing Boing

I don’t like cops.  But I hate security guard tough guys even more.

So you’re presented with an opportunity to shoot some photos in foul weather, but you don’t have any real rain gear for your camera.  What can you do?

Before you leave the house go to the kitchen and grab a large zip-lock bag.  Cut a slit in one side of the bag long enough to pass your lens through, but short enough to keep a pretty tight stretched seal on the lens.  On the other side cut a small hole so that you can poke your viewfinder through and slide your eyecup on to hold the bag in place.

A gallon sized bag was a perfect match for my 5D body with battery grip and my 24 – 105mm lens.  Bigger lenses will obviously require bigger bags.  It worked pretty well and I was still able to use my monopod.  Hand access was a little cramped, but I was still able to shoot pretty easily.  Here’s a couple pics.  Notice the top of the bag is at the bottom of the camera.

Large zip-lock bags have been a standard part of my travelling photo kit for a little while now, they are crucial when you go from shooting in cold weather to sitting in a warm area.  Before you get into the warm area you want to disassemble your set-up and put the parts in bags.  Going from cold to warm means condensation will show up, with your parts in bags the condensation will cling to the bag walls instead of the sensitive camera parts.

I’ve created a new web site to showcase some of my favorite pictures.  Check it out here: Jeff Hoy, Photography

I’m still working on filling it up and I’ll be making some organizational changes to it as well over time.  It’s definitely a work in progress for now and the immediate future.  It’s got pictures from way back when I first started considering photography as a hobby.  Quit reading this and go check it out.

I went and checked it out on Saturday, it was pretty neat.  I took my camera and came back with almost 400 pictures.  I had my tilt-shift lens along with some of my other non-specialty lenses.  This was the first time I really experimented with the TS and I’ve got a bit to learn about using it effectively.  I did have one cool picture come out though.  Check it.

Scott Bourne over at TWIP posted on brand loyalty and the reasons behind it.  I would slightly disagree on terminology with him, what he’s talking about is beyond brand loyalty.  It’s personal identification, meaning, people get so attached to a brand name or product that they think they’re as much a part of it as it is of them.  It’s not loyalty, they feel they ARE the product and any insult directed at the product is directed at them.  Some parts of the web refer to it as fanboyism.  If somebody introduces themselves as a “Canon shooter” and they’re not getting a check from Canon for saying it then that is a person who’s self is completely ingrained in the product.  It usually comes from spending a lot of money on said product and the self-doubt that usually comes with it.  Scott goes on to make a lot of points about that and the fear that drives it.  He’s pretty much right on.

Brand loyalty though is usually something along the lines of “Well, I owned this Dodge pickup for 20 years and it’s held up great, but it’s time for a new truck.  I think I’ll get another Dodge.”  That’s brand loyalty, not fanboyism.

Fanboyism certainly isn’t limited to photography gear.  I see it all the time in my other hobbies.  You have Losi drivers, Associated drivers, Traxxas drivers and they’ll have knock-down, drag-out arguments over which company makes the best monster truck or 1/10th scale stadium truck or whatever.  Don’t even get me started on the video game scene.  Fanboyism is taken to new heights in the video games.

I don’t really understand where it all comes from.  If you bought something, spent a lot of money on it, then just enjoy it.  Just remember that if you spend $1500 – $3000 on a camera body, you’re going to have a great camera no matter what brand you go with.  Who cares what somebody else takes pictures with, or plays video games on, or drives.  If you’re spending all your time arguing over who’s whatsits is better then you’re not out there spending time on the hobby you say you love.

Now that’s not to say that there can’t be a little ball-busting here and there over these things, I tease my dad sometimes because his Digital Rebel XS is so much smaller than my 5D, not that that really makes any kind of difference.  But if you’re sending people death threats about this stuff, like Scott says he’s received, then you need to chill out.  You should consider giving up the hobby, take up something that doesn’t get you so worked up.  Maybe try checking yourself into the psych ward and watching the grass grow for a while.

I’ve got nothing interesting to post about right now.  I went out for a photo day with my dad at the Lake Pueblo State Wildlife Area, a designated area outside of the state park.  It had snowed the night before and there was about an inch of snow on the ground.  It was really a sight.  I’m still sorting through the pictures, some are ok and I may be putting them up after I do some retouching, but overall I’m disappointed with what I got.

FedEx delivered some photo prints that I ordered from Mpix.com today, I’m really happy with the quality of them.  I think I’ll be using them exclusively for large prints of my pictures.  I don’t really need them for smaller prints as I have a nice pro quality photo printer for up to 13×19 prints.

I’m still working on posts for my Iraq deployment retrospective.  There’s a lot of memories to commit to bits and bytes, it’s just a matter of sorting them and typing them up.

MST3K is the best show about riffing terrible movies ever, and the Digital Archive Project is the best MST3K archiving project ever.  You can get most of the MST3K episodes via BitTorrent through the DAP tracker.  I’ve been downloading like a mad man, and I’m seeding everything I download too.

That’s about all I have to say for today.  My posting schedule is going down the hole.  I don’t want it to, but I just can’t find anything I want to post about.

When it comes to digital photography info and reviews dpreview.com is one of my most trusted resources, and this article on their relatively new blog illustrates why.  They took a common myth, bandied about by everybody and their mom without any proof and smashed it using charts, samples, and easy-to-understand explanations.

What they did this time was explain why downsampling a digital image (making it smaller using a special filter in photo editing software) doesn’t always reduce noise in the image created by the camera’s sensor or other elements.

One of the reasons that theories about downsampling reducing noise don’t appear to work in practice is that the theory assumes noise is random. Unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily true. Noise at a single photosite will effect adjacent pixels as part of the demosaicing process. So noise doesn’t occur as individual pixels but as grain. The mathematical theory may tell you that downsampling works but it won’t if your noise grains are any larger than one pixel (and they nearly always are from a camera with a bayer color filter array).

Read the whole thing, there’s pictures and everything.  They really laid the smack down on this myth.

DPReview.com’s staff are highly knowledgeable in the realm of digital photography.  Any time I am thinking about buying a new digital camera or accessory their site is the first one I look to.