Today most of our upper end cam­eras have the ability to adjust focus on a lens-by-lens basis. Using that fea­ture can elim­i­nate the front focus and back focus prob­lems that some report with their lens/camera com­bi­na­tion. That’s the good news, the bad news is that you have to find a way to deter­mine what focus adjust­ment to store in the camera for each lens.

One of those ways is to use the LensAlign system from Michael Tapes Design. I have that system and I guess I should just say that I don’t use it. For me, it’s just too big a hassle get­ting it all set up and aligned to the camera. Not that it doesn’t work or it’s not accu­rate, because I believe that it is.

So my lenses have ended up unad­justed in the set­tings of my camera. And the LensAlign sits in its box on the shelf.

On Twitter I started seeing tweets about some­thing called the Focus Pyramid from Allure Multimedia. The Focus Pyramid is much sim­pler in both design and use com­pared to the LensAlign. For one thing, the Focus Pyramid is made out of card­board that you fold up into a pyramid yourself!

To use it, you just put it on a flat sur­face, aim your camera at it, and shoot some frames to iden­tify where the focus point of your com­bi­na­tion is. Give that lens a little + or a little — in the focus adjust­ment menus of your camera, and take another shot to con­firm focus at the center of the target. They have a video to show you how it works.

The wildest thing? It cost just $9.99 as its intro­duc­tory price. I couldn’t pass it up, at that price, and ordered one.

It works as adver­tised and takes just a few min­utes to get a lens set up for your camera. All my lenses have been checked and adjusted (it just so hap­pens that they all needed some about of + cor­rec­tion). I need to take more pic­tures to prove this all out, but the one’s I’ve shot so far have been focused right on the first shot at the widest lens apertures.

Now you surely know that a $9.99 system can’t be “just the same as” a $79.95 system. I sus­pect that the Focus Pyramid is less accu­rate because it is made of flex­ible card­board and doesn’t have any system to be sure that it is, in fact, level and square to your camera’s focal plane. But it worked fine for my lenses. I don’t have any lenses with max­imum aper­tures greater than f/2.8, so there could be trouble with f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses, I suppose.

Anyway, for $9.99, you can’t lose much by trying one.

With the upgraded release of Pixelmator 2.0, its time to update my pre­vious Pixelmator For Photographers? article.

When I wrote that article, I thought there were a few key things missing for photographers:

Version 2.0 has closed the gap some­what by adding:

And as extras, we now have:

Different than some pho­tog­ra­phers, my style of flash pho­tog­raphy ben­e­fits from TTL con­trol of the off camera flashes. I know many stick to manual con­trol, but TTL works for what I do. And so I want a TTL based system that does not depend on line-of-sight or the “right” ambient light conditions.

I am using the RadioPopper PX system with my Nikon speed­lights (SB-900s) and used them, before my switch to Nikon, with Canon speedlites (580 EXs). They work very well and pro­vide all of the native Nikon (i-TTL) or Canon (E-TTL) system fea­tures because they work by inter­cepting the pre-flash signals, translating them into radio signals, transmitting those sig­nals to the receiver and then decoding the radio sig­nals back into light. Here is a past article of mine about the RapioPopper PX system for Canon.

The main reason I chose the RadioPopper PX system for my Canon flashes was due to the RF inter­fer­ence prob­lems the PocketWizard ControlTL system has with Canon flash (which is not true of their PocketWizard Plus II or MultiMAX sys­tems). Now that I’m using Nikon flashes, the PocketWizard ControlTL system is again an option as there is no such inter­fer­ence problem. So I wanted to doc­u­ment my research com­paring the two sys­tems for Nikon flashes. I don’t have the PocketWizards, so that infor­ma­tion is based on online research.

A key dif­fer­ence in the sys­tems is that the PocketWizards use their own flash con­trol “lan­guage” called ControlTL (Control The Light). They work by taking the camera’s TLL signal from the camera’s hot shoe and con­verting that to ControlTL, trans­mit­ting that to the receiver and then sending com­mands to the flash through the flash’s hot shoe. Either a MiniTT1 or a FlexTT5 can be the trans­mitter while only the FlexTT5 can be a receiver.

As best I can tell, there are no radio inter­fer­ence prob­lems with the Nikon flashes. That’s good because, for me, that was the no-go problem with using the PocketWizard system with Canon flashes.

Because PocketWizard uses ControlTL to con­trol the remote flashes, there is not a one-to-one cor­re­spon­dence between Nikon i-TTL com­mands and ControlTL com­mands. In prac­tice that means:

ControlTL Can Do Some Things i-TTL Can’t

• HyperSync—allows studio flash and some hot shoe flashes to sync at faster than x-sync speeds and up to 1/8000 second.
• Simple hot shoe connections—no need for the spe­cial brackets the RadioPoppers use to line up with the flash con­trol sensor on the speedlight.
• Work without an on camera flash controller—no need for an SU-800 or a speedlight.
• Change with firmware revisions—both the MiniTT1 and the FlexTT5 can have firmware updates (to cor­rect bugs or to add fea­tures) made using your com­puter and the USB port on the devices.

i-TTL Can Do Some Things ControlTL Can’t

• Separate expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion and flash expo­sure compensation—Nikon’s i-TTL system let’s you con­trol one sep­a­rately from the other.
• Use the SB-900 light patterns—using the Center or Even light pat­terns avail­able with the SB-900 will casue expo­sure errors using PocketWizards.
• Work in mirror up mode—ControlTL just won’t.
• Allow flash repeat mode—ControlTL just won’t.
• Mix radio and pre-flash—RadioPoppers don’t inter­fere with the pre-flash as PocketWizard does.
• Control flash zones from the camera menu—you’ll need a PocketWizard AC3 Zone Controller for that.
• Future “proof”—PocketWizard firmware may have to be updated for future flash and cameras.

Of course, PocketWizard’s upgrad­able firmware means that its abil­i­ties can expand with revisions.

PocketWizard also offers matching radio con­trols for studio strobes that allow the strobe power to be con­trolled from the camera (although not in TTL):

• AC9 AlienBees Adapter
• PowerST4 for Elinchrom RX
• PowerMC2 for Einstein E640 Flash

So, will I be selling my RadioPopper gear and buying PocketWizard equip­ment? Maybe. But prob­ably not right now. I’d like to see if RadioPopper will make another firmware upgrade to allow more of i-TTL’s fea­tures into ControlTL. Or even surpass them.