Tag Archive for: how to

Removing ghost Google Wifi devices from Google home

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This has nothing to do with photography

But I still wanted to share this tip because it drove me nuts for months. How to remove ghost Google wifi devices from Google Home?

How to remove ghost Google wifi devices from Google Home?

Google Home is a great system if you want an easy way to automate your home and connect everything together. Also, the Google Home app is easy to use and supports a lot of automation and devices are almost added automatically. So when it all works so easily you might expect that if you have to replace a defective Wifi unit it’s super easy to remove that device…..you probably already guessed it, but it’s not.

I tried almost everything (except of course delete the home and rebuild everything). But whatever I tried there was no way to remove the old device. At one point I just gave up and accepted that the ghost of my defective Wifi device would haunt me forever.

But I would not be writing this blog post when I did not find a solution.
And it’s not logical, to be honest.

If you have a Google Home Wifi device that is not accessible anymore you can remove it by following these steps.
How to remove ghost Google wifi devices from Google Home?
Go to the device and open the settings.
Now wait (it will take a while)
When it opens up click on the factory reset

Now when you look it’s still there, but don’t give up.
Do exactly the same.
Go to settings, wait, and do the factory reset.

Now close the app and open the app and voila… you exorcized the Ghost of the Wifi device.
I hope this helped some of you that had the same problem I had.

Did this article help you? Please let us know. Find me on social media.

 

 

 

The most amazing deal of the year

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It’s time for the 5DayDeal again

If you want to get the most amazing deal for your photography, I think the 5daydeal is exactly that.
Every year they deliver the goods and also this year the deal is jam-packed with awesome tutorials, e-books, filters, presets and software.

We made a special page for the 5 day deal.
If you use our link you also support our work.

This year you will also find 2 of my new tutorials in the deal.
Did you know… Lightroom
And
A full length lighting tutorial for portraiture and fashion.

Add those two together and you already have the value of the total package 😀
So head on over to the page and order your 5daydeal today and start learning for.. well at least another year (yep it’s that jam-packed).

The problem with a global shutter that a lot of people will miss

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Yes, Sony revolutionised the photography market

Without any doubt one of the biggest steps forward has been released by Sony, and it’s called the A9III
But why is it this huge step forward?

One might think that when we talk about huge steps we talk about MegaPixels, ISO etc. But this is all just adding to something we already have. When I talk about a huge step forward I of course mean the new Global Shutter.

Global shutter?

So why is this global shutter thing such a big deal?
When you work with strobes you probably know that the term X-sync.
The X-sync is the maximum shutter speed you can can use without seeing an annoying black bar due to the second shutter curtain.
For most cameras with studio strobes if you stay at or below 1/125 you will have no problems at all, and in the studio this is actually no limit. Most studios are dark so the slower 1/125 shutterspeed is no problem.

However when we go outside things change.
When we work with strobes we now have to compete with the ambient light.
Take into account the limit of 1/125 and you quickly understand why a lot of those shots with loads of strobe power have a DOF from here to eternity 😀
In other words, outside we often have to shoot at f22 to get the balance we need due to that 1/125 limit.

Solutions

Luckily there are solutions.

  1. Make sure you don’t place your subject close to the top. This way you can shoot at 1/160 and sometimes a bit higher without noticing the black bar. It’s still there for the strobe but the ambient light will not show it and the subject is somewhere in the middle so it will still get the strobe. A quick fix but far from perfect due to the huge limitation for composition (but it’s a nice one if you have to and can for example crop later in Photoshop).
  2. A bit more serious are solutions like HSS, HS
    With HSS your strobe fires a lot of flashes during the exposure making sure the sensor is always lit by the strobe. This eats both power from the strobe but also from your batteries, it’s also a system that’s not 100% stable in output and can overheat a strobe pretty fast.
    HS is a system that uses the cut off and raise of the strobe, not to make it too difficult it uses a very slow strobe to get faster shutter speeds, same issue here is that it eats power.
  3. It doesn’t help with the shutterspeed but you can use ND filters to get a shallow DOF, although this can work great there are some disadvantages, first of all a good ND filter for use with strobes will be a pretty strong one, or a variable (I have the KF concept in my kit and really like that one) And with the stronger ND filters you will get into some problems with focussing speed. Also some ND filters will give you a light drop off in the corners.
  4. Leaf shutter lenses
    Leaf shutter lenses are awesome but expensive.
    The shutter is inside the lens and this means it breaks the limit of 1/125 with ease, there is still a limit (for example 1/1500) which in most cases however is more than enough, especially because most of these lenses are found in the Medium Format cameras.
  5. Cheap cameras
    Believe it or not but years ago I shot with a very affordable small Fuji camera which was able to shoot up to 1/1000 with strobes. This was a far cry from a professional camera, but I decided to include it to make the list complete.

So what’s the big deal with a global shutter?

In short….
There is no real limit anymore.
You would be able to shoot strobes up to 1/16000 or even 1/80000 when using Sony compatible strobes.
Sounds awesome right?
And it is, but there is one limit I have to tell you about that will prevent some nasty surprises.

The speed is important

The idea of shooting at 1/16000 will excite a lot of photographer but it could also be a huge disappointment, but that last part can be solved with a bit of technical information.

When we use our camera we all know that the shutterspeed will determine the “freezing power” of your camera.
The faster the shutterspeed the more action is frozen.
When we use strobes we often just look at the output. And in the past this is 100% understandable, most strobes are fast enough to freeze motion in the studio so we often don’t link shutter speeds to flash durations.

When we look at the specs of our strobes we do however see a value that links the two.
The t0.1 and t0.5 values. You might notice that those values are often mentioned in a range from very fast to slower,
Maybe you also found out that the way the motion is captured does vary depending on the power output of your strobes, especially with cheaper strobes it’s very possible that there are only a few power settings that will freeze the motion, where with the others there always is a slight blur.

When I look at the strobes I’ve worked with over the years there were strobes that topped out at 1/1000 and 1/60000.
As you can see this is a huge difference.
So what is the link with a global shutter?

Let’s shoot a mountain biker at 1/16000 with our strobe on full power.
Now let’s shoot the same mountain biker at 1/16000 with our strobe at 75% power.
I can almost predict that the 75% setting will be brighter.

So what’s going on?

You can shoot with the shutterspeed at 1/16000 and there will be no black bar in the frame, however the strobe has to be just as fast as the shutterspeed otherwise the shutterspeed will be cutting off the power of the strobe while it stills flashes.

This is very difficult to visualize because our eyes can’t see how fast a strobe fires, so we need a special tool for this.
To measure the flashduration of my strobes I’m using the Sekonic 858 lightmeter.
When I measure my Geekoto strobes I can clearly see that they are incredibly fast in the lower settings, as soon as I pass half power they are still fast enough to freeze any motion (1/5000+) but when I reach full power the flashduration gets a serious hit. Now this has nothing to do with the Geekoto strobes, but it’s all strobes and brands, it’s simply how it works.

So how does this fit in the global shutter story.
When you read the reviews and specs on the A9III you might expect that your strobe will behave the same as in the studio and this can lead to not getting the maximum performance out of your brand new camera.

The best way to make sure you get the maximum out of your system is to shoot a series of images on a white wall with the camera on a tripod. Don’t change anything on the camera itself but only change the output of the strobe. Do this for several shutter speeds and watch where the strobe starts to get dimmer and put a sticker on the strobe with those settings.

Why is this important?

When you use a lightmeter on location the meter has “no limits”, so it will give you the value of the full strobe, if the strobe has a flash duration of 1/800 or 1/16000 it doesn’t matter for the meter. Now that we know that the shutterspeed of the camera can cut off the strobe it’s also clear that when we are shooting above the “speed limit” of the strobe the value on the meter will not correspond with what you get in your photo.

Besides the trick with the white wall there is a solution for this, but it’s not cheap, but it will make it much easier.
When you use the Sekonic 858 there is a setting that doesn’t just meters the light but also the flashduration. This can be a very useful tool where you can not only find the setting with the fastest flashduration, but also to know how fast you can set your cameras shutterspeed.

A feature that was handy for reviews in the past has now become an essential tool to use your flash system to the max, and that’s a good thing, a really good thing. We can do amazing things with global shutters and flash, can’t wait to test it out myself.

 

To be clear, I have not shot with the A9III, this why there are no examples (I don’t fake examples), the technique however is universal.
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Calibrations demystified

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Calibrations are essential and easy

Let’s first take a look at what a calibration is.
I’m writing this blogpost in English.
I chose English because I know that most people in the world understand English better than Dutch. And the fact I don’t speak any languages as good as Dutch and English.

So because I’m writing this in English everyone reading this understands me.
And this is because we use rules and letters in combinations that we agreed upon as the English language.

And with calibrations it’s the same.
We have many different devices ranging from your camera, to your printer, monitor and scanner.
Some devices are capture devices, some are output devices, but they all use different techniques, and still you want your images to look exactly the same on all devices right?

Luckily there is a solution for this.

Home Theater

When we look at the home theater market calibrations are done to get the optimal image quality out of your tv or projector setup. During these calibrations high-end calibration devices and software are used costing thousands of dollars, and in most cases there is no auto-mode 😀

Now you might wonder, “what is optimal image quality?”
Is this “max light output?”, “the best colors?”
And what is best, or max?

Well luckily there are rules for this.
For most TVs and projectors we use the REC709 colourspace for SDR material (normal HD material) and BT2020 or P3 for the new HDR material.
For the correct colors in the ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) setup we use the D6500 standard.

During a calibration for a tv or projector we look at the following settings.
User settings like Contrast and Brightness to set the perfect dynamic range.
Grayscale for the correct color temperature
CMS (Color Management System) for the correct colors per colourspace.
Gamma for the brightness curve
Extra features like sharpness, iris, motion flow etc.

Because the same rules the calibration follows is also followed by everyone that makes professional movies we can now see the movie exactly as the director intended on our projectors or TVs. And we all know that color evokes emotion, so seeing the correct colors and colortone can have a huge impact on the movie experience.

For Photography and video

Now for Home Theater the process can be complicated and you need to know what you’re doing (I’ve been doing it since 2001 and still have to learn every new format and display) but the workflow is very basic and simple. We just follow what the movie industry follows. For photography it’s the other way around almost.

For photography the process itself is super simple but we have a lot of different devices and things we have to take care off to get it all working together.
So lets take a look at what we can encounter.

First off we have the input devices

Cameras, scanners etc are input devices. This means we have a file that has to be used as our reference file.
One of the tools that’s essential for a fast calibration is the Calibrate Colorchecker passport.
The process is very simple, you just shoot the colorchecker with proper lighting (use a lightmeter) and you can use the included Lightroom plugin or the standalone version.

Now we have to make sure we follow the workflow
After you restart Lightroom you select the colorchecker profile you created from the custom profiles and sync this to the rest of the images you shot with this setup. And indeed when you use the colorchecker with your camera it’s highly recommended to shoot a new colorchecker image with every change in your setup. If you are not incredibly critical you can also create one profile for your camera/strobe combination. It will not be 100% correct but it will be close.

One thing I always do is when I select the profile from the menu you see here, just before syncing I’ll do a quick colorbalance with the colorbalance tool in Lightroom.

Now lets look at the output devices

Output devices can be for example a monitor or printer.
Now we already looked at the colorchecker for the input devices and believe it or not for the output devices we use a similar technique with one difference, now we need a device to meter what the monitor or printer outputs.

I personally really like the Calibrite products due to their ease of use and quality, plus they work with the hardware calibrations on the BenQ monitors I use.
But you can also use other brands of course, just make sure you replace your analyser every few years because they will deteriorate over time.

For the printer we need a so called spectroradiometer and for the monitor we can use the same technique but also a much cheaper solution like for example tristimuls meters. But without getting to technical.

The calibration is very simple.
I’ll walk you through the more advanced version.

You start the software.
Use the following settings:
Color Temp D6500 (some setups depend on D54 but you will know if that’s you)
Gamma 2.2 (2.4) depending on your preference and room.
Lightoutput 110-130cdm depending on your ambient light conditions.
Profile V2

These are the settings you will find in almost all software, and will give you a perfectly calibrated screen.
Now the software will ask you to activate this profile and send you a reminder after X weeks, please don’t ignore that because calibrations do change over time. After you activate the calibration you’re done.

Different profiles, so now what?

By now we have created several profiles.
The colorchecker creates both DCP (Adobe) and ICC profiles.
The monitor calibration creates an ICC profile etc.
But luckily we don’t have to worry about them anymore. The profiles are now exactly where they should be. In the operating system for the monitor and in Lightroom for your camera where you can now select it and sync to the photos shot with that combination.

Why do I mention this?
A lot of people ask me which profile to use when opening files in Photoshop from Lightroom, the monitor profile or the camera profile?
Well both are wrong, how weird it might sound, you can’t use any of them.

When you open up a file in Photoshop you should always select the colourspace that you want to work in, being sRGB, AdobeRGB or ProphotoRGB.
If your monitor is capable of showing 99% AdobeRGB, thanks to the calibration you will now see all the colors as close to accurate as possible, but also when you have to work in another colourspace the monitor and calibration will make sure you are still seeing the correct colors.

Some things to make sure are in place

For a correct and easy workflow there are some things you have to take care off.
When using HDMI make sure your monitor is setup for 0-255 as dynamic range. (16-235 is for video)
Make sure there is no light hitting your monitor, BenQ delivers a nice hood with most of their photography monitors and these can make a huge difference.
As mentioned before a color analyser deteriorates over time, so make sure to replace it every once in a while. The same goes for the colorchecker, and for the colorchecker you can extend it’s life a lot by keeping it out of the sun when not using.

 

This is one part in the series on calibration and colorprofiles, make sure to check the blog for much more.
If you’re in the market for a new monitor, we have some 10% discount codes for BenQ monitors for European customers, mail us for more information.