A Journey of a Thousand Miles

Canon today has released the 7D the camera is aimed at the upper amateur and burgeoning professional market. The 7D will have and APS-C sized sensor giving a crop of 1.5 times (correction it will have a crop of 1.63 giving the 7D a slightly larger sensor than any of the previous APS-C sensors that Canon has offered) while being compatible with the entire line of Canon EF lenses and EF-S lenses. The most impressive feature of this camera is the claimed weather sealing, Canon has traditionally only offered weather sealing on their professional 1 series cameras, leaving a lot of people disappointed and looking to other manufacturers that offer this feature on their amateur series of cameras.

Canon 7D

The 7D will find a good home between the 50D and the 5D mark II however from the initial look of the spec sheet, the camera will not be so much of an upgrade that many 50D users will be tempted to upgrade. I imagine that a lot of professional sports and wildlife shooters will be looking to this camera because of its fast frame rate 8fps and the weather sealing that is offered, very comparable to the professional 1 series cameras for a fraction of the price.

Key features of the 7D will include:

• 18MP APS-C CMOS sensor
• 8 frames per second continuous shooting
• 1080p HD video recording with manual controls
• 3.0 inch Clear View II LCD screen with 920,000 dots
• 19-point AF system (all cross-type)
• 1.0x magnification and 100% coverage viewfinder
• Wireless flash control
• Environmental sealing

Press release via www.dpreview.com

Hands on preview via www.dpreview.com

Over the course of the last week I had been increasingly worried about the low battery life on my new 50D. I would charge the battery and by the end of a day of light shooting, it would be nearing the end of it’s life. I was starting to think that I had a bad battery, having bought an after market battery for the camera, but the problem would persist with the Canon battery that came with the camera as well.

It turns out that the camera comes with the default setting of having “Auto Power Off” set to never. This in turn drains the battery when the camera is not switched off manually. For someone like me who rarely or never turns the camera off while I am out shooting this can be a particularly troubling issue.

To change the default setting, enter the camera menu, under the first camera tools menu (the yellow one with the wrench) there is an option to change the auto power off settings. I have set mine to four minutes, the camera will power down and go into standby. It will come back to life on the first push of the shutter button. This ensures that you will not miss shots fiddling with the power on switch in the back and it has solved the battery life issues.

I still don’t know how much life I get out of a battery , after changing the auto power off setting, I have gone from a single day of light shooting to a week with the battery registering as fully charged.

I hope this helps with what I consider to be a major concern with this camera.

In reaction to an upcoming trip to Nepal I have succumbed and purchased a Canon 50D my previous camera, a Canon 350D was getting on in years and with more than 50,000 shots on the clock it is breaking into the range of potential problems. Not something I want to deal with when I am in the heart of the Himalayas and thousands of miles from the nearest camera store. I had not initially been swayed by the 50D’s extra mega pixel count or the ISO boost offered over the 40D. The 50D offered a number of features that I wanted in a camera but at a cost $500 more than the 40D. I was ready to sink my money into the 40D but when I waled into the store with money in hand, I found out that the 50D had dropped in price by $200 a difference of $300 was enough to sway me toward the 50D.

So what do I think of the camera? I won’t go into a full review that has already been done, in far more depth and far better then I ever could. What I will say is that the 50D is a joy to use. The buttons are all in the right places, the menu is easy to navigate and the camera, unlike the 350D does not feel too small in my hands.
Image quality has so far been a bit confusing, with huge file sizes it is very hard to make judgements on noise. The camera seems to have a bit more noise than the 350D at similar ISOs. However when viewing photos you have to keep in mind that the file sizes are huge and the noise levels at similar file sizes is much better. The noise also has a very soft feel and looks much better than digital noise I am use to. It looks very similar to film grain and has a very appealing effect.

The other thing I was surprised by was how few shots I got from the camera. The huge files sizes also function to reducing a 4gb cf card to 180 or so shots. This means that extended shoots with this camera will need a lot more memory than I had previously been using.

So far I have been very pleased with this camera and I imagine that I will be pleased for years to come as I tend to hold on to bodies for much longer than the current market cycle.

One thing that has been reinforced by this purchase is how little quality difference is made by an upgrade of bodies in comparison to and upgrade in lenses. When I traded my 70-300 f4-5.6 lens for the 200mm f 2.8 L, the jump in image quality was unbelievable.  I would highly recommend getting good glass before getting concerned that the newest camera has five more mega pixels or a boost in ISO.

Canon has released two new lenses at PMA this year. I am very excited about the 17mm f.4 tilt shift lens. 17mm has long been a staple lens for landscape photographers and tilt shift lenses have found their way into many great photographers kits. They are wonderful lenses and have a range of uses from making kitchy “miniature” looking photos by manipulating the depth of field, to bringing just the right amout of focus to a landscape and allowing you to correct abberations created by not having your lens level to your subject. You know those building that always seem like they are pointed at the top and the lines of the building are not strait, tilt shif just might be for you.
This is also one lens that if it proves to be sharp, may end Canon’s long held repuation for having lenses that are soft at the wide end. Though we will have to wait and see if this lens can stand up to scrutiny, I am exctied about having a tiltshif lens that is at the wider end of things. Currently Canon offers a newly released 24mm as well as their 45mm and 90mm tiltshift lenes. The TS-E17mm f/4L will also be canons second L series lens. So I am doubly excited about the possibilities of this lens as I know the repuation for quality that the L series carries with it.

I’m not really one for rumours. Ok so that is a bit of a lie. I don’t follow rumours but when they become very plausible and don’t seem to outrageous, I tend to pay attention. The latest rumour floating around is that Nikon will be releasing a D400 shortly. With what Nikon has been putting out lately, this will be another camera that is worth watching and if Nikon is able to get the price down to really compete with the 40/50D from Canon, it could be a a camera that a lot of other people are interested in as well.
The one feature that particularly caught my attention was the mention of a touch screen. While I am not so sure this is a good idea, touch screens are harder to navigate, and nearly impossible to navigate when your eyes are not glued to the screen, it is not a feature that is unexpected. Both my phone and mp3 player are touch screen now and I can only imagine it is a matter of time before cameras go touch screen as well, What we lose in tactile function, we will however gain in screen size and resolution.

www.dpreview.com has a comprehensive review of the Canon 5D Mark II posted. This is the site to go to for comprehensive testing of cameras and frankly I would not buy a camera without reading the www.dpreview.com review first. The 5D Mark II unsurprisingly gets a highly recomended status, the best status that a camera can acchive. If you have been looking for the go ahead to buy this camera (that is if you can find it with the constant suply shortages) this might just be the ticket you have been looking for.

Seems like the Canon 5D Mark II is showing some early problems with durability not to even mention the inevitable problems with supply and demand. There is a recent trip review from Antarctica over on The Luminous Landscape that describes some serious issues with cameras quiting due to fairly light weather conditions. I don’t know what Canon was thinking in the first place, with such a minor design issue such as weather sealing, it is shocking that it is not included on a camera that costs nearly $3000 and is likely to be Canon’s most used camera by professional photographers.

These early signs of problems and weaknesses with Canon’s flagship camera could spell problems for Canon, with the Nikon D700 being a very serious competitor, many current owners of a Canon system could jump ship and make the move to Nikon.

Personally I would never buy a camera in the first few months of production. Electronic companies are notorious for putting products into the market and letting the early consumers Beta test it.

Jay Williams has a wonderful plugin for Lightroom that allows for automatic export to a pixelpost photoblog. I have been using this plugin in lightroom 1 for quite some time now but up until recently it has not worked in Lightroom 2. There is however, now a fix up that allows the plugin to work with Lightroom 2. Just download the plugin and follow the instructions on the download page.
It can be quite time consuming on the first install but the time it will save on posting is well worth the effort. If you already have the plugin installed and are just looking to update for Lightroom 2, it is a simple matter of downloading and replacing plugin file inside of the Lightroom file structure.

Get it Here.

Canon has released a firmware update to fix the banding and black dot phenomenon that have been appearning in photos from the 5D mark II. It will be interesting to see in the next few weeks as users install the firmware if it is a universal fix to the problem as this problems is a major black dot on what is likely Canons most widely used pro and semi pro camera.

And with so many competitors releasing comparible cameras this year the previous issues with the 5D mark II must have been driving sales away from Canon.

If you are a flickr user, and lets face it most people have dabbled with it at one point or another, you might be interstesd in slideoo, a very slick little piece of software that creates a horizontal slideshow of your flickr images. It has minimal options but does alow for some choice in the size of the photos that are used and you can choose between one of your sets or your photostream. Just imput your user name, select what photos you want to use and the sizes and in about six seconds you have a very nice little slide show of images that can be placed anywhere you can use html code.