- I am an outdoor lifestyle photographer and filmmaker based in Seattle WA. I love to push the envelope with my work and I enjoy sharing what I learn along the way.
This blog will show both current work as well as how-to's and insight on becoming a better photographer and DSLR filmmaker.
- Kirk Mastin
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Category Archives: lo-fi
Find Your Place: Spec Running Shoe Ad Shot on Canon 5D
My fellow friend and fellow photographer Michael Hanson and I went out for a few hours and shot a quick, simple, and hopefully inspiring running shoe ad.
It was a culmination of ideas we are throwing around on how to make emotional ads for outdoor companies in a short time frame and with very little gear. I think it turned out well and we are stoked to make a few more of these this Summer for clients.
Equipment:
Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 50mm 1.4
Canon 70-200 2.8 IS
Canon 45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift
Edited in Final Cut Pro
Graded with Magic Bullet Looks
Logistics:
Planning time: 3 hours
Shoot time: 3 hours
Edit time: 4 hours
Total time spent on this video: 10 hours
Also posted in Canon EOS 5D, DSLR Cinema, video
2 Comments
Extreme iPhone Photo Enlargements: A How-To Guide
I’ve been dying to see how iPhone photos hold up to rather extreme enlargement.
According to Microsoft, the maximum printing size for a 2-megapixel photo is 5×6.7 at 240dpi.
So what did I do? I went ahead and printed this photo at 12×18 at 240dpi!
(The MAXIMUM size you can print at Costco, and it only cost me $2.50.)
The final result?
In one word: Stunning.
12×18 Noritsu Print from Costco.
…and I used to work as a printer at a professional camera lab!
Of course if you view the image closer than 2-3 ft you can see the grain in the image. However, most photos of this size are usually viewed at a distance of at least 4-6ft away. In this case, the photo looks amazing. The grain in an iPhone photo is irregular. iPhone photos have much smoother grain than many digital point and shoot cameras, which is a great thing: iPhone photo grain mimics analog film grain.
Detail of print showing grain.
So there you go.
Go and make gallery-ish sized prints with your iPhone without fear of humiliation from your art friends.
If they are so close that they are peeping the grain of the photo and complaining about that then I would say they missed the whole point of how cool this is and what possibilities this creates for lo-fi photography.
Have fun!
-Kirk
Step by step instructions:
1. Take a good iPhone photo (enough light, not blurry)
2. Apply a CameraBag filter, save photo at highest quality (look inside CameraBag settings)
3. Download photo to computer.
4. Email photo to Costco’s photo lab, or bring file in on CD.
5. Print photo at whatever size you want. A 12×18 print is $2.50. How can you beat that?
6. Enjoy! Impress your friends! Have an Art show!
7. Blog about this article or better yet, Tweet about it on Twitter 
Also posted in articles, iphone
Tagged Apple, Costco, Film grain, Handhelds, iphone, Microsoft, Photograph, Photography, Point-and-shoot camera, Printing, Smartphone, Smartphones, Twitter
6 Comments
Two Excellent iPhone Apps for Photographers: CameraBag & Pano
I don’t openly shill for any kind of product. Never have, never will.
On the other hand I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t share two iPhone camera apps that dramatically improve your iPhone photo quality, (especially when you want to upload photos directly to a blog or Flickr account.)
Both of these apps would have been useful in India, where my girlfriend brought her iPhone while I brought my big ole’ Canon 5D.
CameraBag
CameraBag is a fairly inexpensive iPhone app that allows you to apply custom filters over your iPhone photos. You can either do this at the time of capture, or afterward by picking photos from your photo roll.
There are a limited number of filters available, each of which mimic a unique film style. The only filter that really sucks is the Infrared filter which is completely useless. That being said, the other filters, most notably the Helga filter (which supposedly mimics a Holga) is really nice.
Kirk + Robin. Seattle, WA. 2008.
You can save and reopen photos, adding additional filters each time to tweak your photo even more. All in all an idiot-proof way to tone photos without a computer.
’1962′ Black and White Filter.
’1974′ Vintage Film Filter.
Normally I would NEVER tone a photo in my iPhone, preferring the robust options available in Lightroom or Photoshop.
CameraBag is the first iPhone app to make me reconsider this rule.
Pano
Pano is an iPhone app that allows you to create very wide and very detailed panoramic photos with your iPhone.
Pano is easy to use and works very very well.
Just take a photo, and Pano will provide a semi-transparent guide from that photo that you align with the next photo and so on. Once you have shot up to six photos, Pano will adjust exposure for each photo and stitch the multiple images into one giant panoramic photo.
It is really incredible how well Pano does this considering the relatively small amount of processing power and RAM available on the iPhone.
Pano works much better than some of my manual attempts at stitching photos together on a much more powerful MacPro Tower using Photoshop.
If you shoot each photo using horizontal shots, you get an insanely wide final panoramic like this:
If you shoot each photo using vertical shots, you get a much higher resolution panoramic like this:
I’m hoping that savvy app developers will continue to expand the creative possibilities of the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera.
(Tomorrow I am going to print an 11x14in from the above photo. I will report back on how that looks, but I will assume that it will look pretty damn good considering the camera.)
-Kirk
Also posted in iphone, review, tips
Tagged Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Canon EOS 5D, Flickr, Handhelds, India, iphone, Photography, Seattle, Smartphones
7 Comments
I’m going to India for three weeks, and all I’m bringing is:
Tomorrow I leave on a three week trip to India with my girlfriend and our mutual friend Jamila.
I’ve really been looking forward to this trip for months now….since Summer really, when we all booked our tickets.
I used to travel a lot when I was younger.
In fact I made it to many corners of the world…in the years leading up to me becoming a photographer. I vowed never to travel abroad again until I was a photographer, a real photographer, and capture what I experienced to share with others.
Now, years later, I find that my job as a photographer has kept me in the United States. I have made a lot of progress in the last few years, but I never fulfilled my wish of using my photography skills outside the United States (except for a brief stint in Sweden and Norway a few years ago.)
I’m heading to India to relax, think about the year ahead, and come back to the United States with a refreshed sense of direction, new goals and hopefully a beautiful set of photos and/or videos.
My whole kit for three weeks. Seattle, WA. 2008.
3 Shirts, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of shorts, hat, Ray Bans, toiletries, small Mole Skine journal, pen, plug converter, flashlight, money belt, Canon intervalometer, Sony T500 + accessories (for 720P HD video,) lens cloth, lens cleaning swabs and fluid, battery charger, Canon 5D, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 17-40mm f4, 24GB of CF Cards, my passport, two novels and last but not least, a small Kata backpack given to me as schwag at last year’ Aurora Photos meeting in Maine.
As you can see I am traveling super light. No more than what can fit into a small school bag. I hope to lose myself in the experience and follow where the story takes me.
More updates to follow, as internet access allows.
-Kirk
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Also posted in India adventure
Tagged Canon, Canon EOS 5D, High-definition video, India, Photography, Sony, Travel, United States
11 Comments
More 5D action: Double Rainbows + Christmas Trees
Double Rainbow. I-5. Washington, 2008.
Totem Pole. Somewhere in Oregon, 2008.
Blue House Smoke. I-5. Washington, 2008.
Christmas Trees. Beaverton, OR. 2008.
We Have Secured a Tree. Beaverton, OR. 2008.
I’ve just come back from a lovely visit to my girlfriend’s sister’s house in Beaverton, Oregon.
We managed to get a great tree for real cheap (thank you economic recession.)
As usual, most of what I shot during the weekend was with the Canon 5D and either a 50mm or 90mm lens.
All I can say is that I’m forgetting what it’s like to use anything else…and I don’t care.
Nothing looks like a 50mm lens.
It’s something about the flatness of the image, the lack of distortion.
It just feels…right.
The lens I used to hate so much is now my only lens. The 90mm came along as a food lens, for some close up pics of what we baked that weekend (cupcakes.)
As time passes I have become more firm in my belief that if a picture isn’t good it isn’t good. No matter if it’s shot with the artifice of an extremely wide or extremely telephoto lens.
If it doesn’t look good as it truly is, (and the 50mm is as close to the truth as you can get…it mimics the field of view of a human, have you heard?) then you can’t make it look good.
Not in the long run. Not with fancy filters, not with any actions, no way, no how, nada.
Most of the classic photos from the past were shot with a 50mm. The original lens. The first optical formula. The easiest, simplest formula.
I love ‘normal.’
I love the 50.
-Kirk
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