Category Archives: Photography

General photography natter — gear, thoughts, ideas, and the odd photo.

Geek-Speak, Photography

If It’s Cold, It Must Be Time for the Eagles

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I took today off, and headed up to Winfield in search of bald eagles. I figured with the cold we’ve had, and the incredible cold we’re about to have, they might be down river far enough for us to see them. There were a few — maybe ten or so that I spotted — along with loads of gulls and even a couple of herons.

This was the first real opportunity to photograph things in motion with the 7D, and I’ve got to admit that 8fps just flat rocks for photographing birds winging their way around the river. However, it’s well worth noting that at 8fps, it’s real easy to fill CF cards quickly. I have only one large card, along with several small ones, and that’s a situation that’s gonna have to change. There are some nice deals out there on 16GB and 32GB cards…

Another thing of great interest that I’ve noted with the 7D. For a several years, I had some issues with my Canon 100-400 L lens triggering Err99 messages on both the 20D and 40D when the lens’ IS system was on. Turn it off, and there’s no problem. I’ve read a ton of information about an apparently large number of folks who have observed the same thing. Today was the first time I’d shot at length with the 100-400 on the 7D, and guess what? No Err99 messages. None. Not once. I don’t claim to understand why that is… Is the 7D more tolerant of whatever condition the 20D and 40D were noticing? Has the 100-400 mysteriously fixed itself? Dunno. But it was a joy to be shooting with the IS on again on the jewel of my lens collection!

Geek-Speak, Photography

Canon EOS 7D : Focus on Focusing

As I hinted at a few weeks ago, there’s a new camera in the Deauxmayne — a shiny new Canon EOS 7D, kitted with a Canon 28-135/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens. I expect this will be the first of several pieces where I describe my real world experiences with this really nice camera.

Yesterday, trying to take advantage of a very light snowfall, Casey and I decided to get together just before sunrise to do a little shooting. This was the first real excursion for the 7D, and needless to say I was excited. It was cold, cold, cold and windy, making for miserable air conditions. However, the sky was gray, and I thought that might help keep the shadows to a minimum for stuff on the ground. We wound up at MoBot, and I spent the biggest part of my time photographing some of the water features that wander through the garden. I fired off what looked to be terrific shots with the new camera, using both the kit lens, and my trusty 100-400/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens.

After almost five hours in the cold, I came home, got some lunch, warmed up, and began to download images from my card.

One thing I noticed right away was that I had almost 500 images on the card. That seemed odd, as I was pretty sure I hadn’t blasted away with quite that frequency. The key was something I noticed while shooting. I was using the “cloudy” white balance setting, and noticed that the cloud indicator on my panel was blinking. That was weird. What I discovered (after I got home) was that I had accidentally set up bracketed white balance when I was trying to set up bracketed exposure. Not a biggie, but it was a bit of a mystery. This meant that almost everything I shot actually recorded three images using this bracketed white balance. I didn’t even know you could do that. Cool, and something I’ll have to play with in the future.

I imported my images into Lightroom 2.6 (freshly updated with support for the 7D), and noticed that most of my shots were soft. Now, I know that the 28-135 isn’t an L lens, but I was surprised to see so much softness, especially since I had manually focused everything, and most of the images have their focus “fine tuned” using live view. While it didn’t ruin my photos, it did make them just too soft for my tastes.

Today, I decided to experiment to see if I could reproduce the problem.

I decided to enlist the help of a fantastic model for trying to figure this issue out. He’s got loads of character, and doesn’t complain about the pay. 🙂

The setup was essentially the same as I used outdoors at MoBot — 7D, 28-135 (zoomed to 135mm), two second self-timer, ISO 160, f/8. I shot three images — one using autofocus (something I didn’t do in the field yesterday), one using manual focus fine-tuned with live view, and one using manual through the viewfinder. Here’s what I found. (Click on the images below to see the full size crops of the samples I shot.)

The autofocus shot was easy. The 7D chose to focus on the upper left part of my model’s hair, and from what I could tell in the zoom up of the shot, it seemed to nail the focus.

The manual focus shot was just as easy. However, here the “human element” of my eyes starts to have potential of influencing the results. I did the best I could, and focused on the nose of my intrepid model.

And last was the manual focus using live view to help dial in the focus. Again, my target was the nose.

From this series of images, it was obvious that autofocus was working fine, manual focus using my eyeballs was good, but manual focus using live view was obviously not focusing on what the screen indicated was being focused on. From my best guess, it appears that manual focus using live view actually brings a clearer image from a little farther away than what is being seen on the screen on the back of the camera. You can see this by looking at the hair on the upper left of the model.

So, what do I do about it? Well, some research about live view and its limitations, more trust of my eyeballs through the viewfinder (and the new 100% coverage viewfinder in the 7D rocks), and more trust of the autofocus system in the camera. It sure seems weird that what you see on the screen is not what you get.

Stay tuned…

Update #1 : I neglected to mention the dedicated live view button. This is a tremendous improvement over the implementation on the 40D. And I should probably mention why live view focus assistance for manual focus is so important to me. When I’m shooting macro work, I really wanna nail the focus within the plane of focus in those tight quarters. Live view helps with that because I can zoom the image 10x over what I can see through the viewfinder, helping me get the focus right where I want it.

Update #2 : The lens in question I had done a rough AF Microadjustment to via the Custom Function menu. This lens (as well as the rest of mine) needed an adjustment of -7. I did this using a test screen on my laptop, as suggested by several folks on the web. I recognize that this isn’t likely the best scenario, but it’s what I had available to me. The interesting thing is that when I turn off the AF Microadjustment for that lens, my focusing with live view seems to be more what I see on the screen. It almost implies that the camera is making an adjustment, based on the AF Microadjustment data, despite the lens sitting in manual focus mode, but only when used with live view.

Of course, I could be all wet on this.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Canon 7D and Software Updates

Having had my Canon 7D for a few weeks, I can safely say that I really like it. Not yet love it, but I like. Why not love? Well, I just haven’t had enough time to exercise it enough to fall in love. I’m in love with its potential, but I haven’t realized that potential practically yet. Mine own dang fault… along with the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day. Dumb ol’ plantary rotation.

One thing that frankly had kinda slowed me down from getting too far down the path for making gobs of shots was that Apple’s Snow Leopard and Adobe products weren’t quite there with support for the new RAW format from the 7D. There’s been a release candidate for Lightroom that supported it, but after reading some of the forum info about that RC, I was concerned that I might end up having to re-import my images or some such nonsense to get them correctly rendered in the future production version of LR when it was released.

Today, both issues are solved: Adobe has released LR 2.6 officially, and Apple has update Snow Leopard to handle the 7D’s RAW files. Both are great news for me, and just in the nick of time.

Tomorrow morning, a gaggle from work are getting together at Forest Park to photograph, and it’ll be the first real world test for me with the 7D. Now that my tools are up to snuff for reading the images I’ll create, that just makes the pot sweeter. Woo-hoo!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t put my Grandpa Simpson voice on and mention the speed of the upgrades. I was downloading the almost 100MB upgrade to Lightroom at just a tick over 1MB/sec. That would’ve been just about one 3.5″ floppy disk every second for just under two minutes. It’s crazy to think about moving that kind of data around that quickly. And man, am I loving it!

Now to go to the camera store and see if there’s any used lenses I need! 🙂

Photoblog, Photography

Will Shoot for Cheese

I got another opportunity today to photograph at the agility field today. After all was done (about 800 shots, I think), Kris surprise me with a basket of cheeses, along with stray apple, toasts, and salmon — what a treat!!!

It kinda reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about farms and small towns of long ago. Folks would swap goods and services all the time. Pretty cool.

So where to start? Hmmmmm…..

Photography

Off the Clock is On!

Tonight, we opened Off the Clock at The Old Orchard Gallery. It was amazing.

We all met up an hour ahead of the announced start time, and put the final touches on the art. From there, it became a bit of blur. Three hours of entertaining our visitors, and talking about our work. I’d guess we had 100 folks drop by during the event, and I can’t imagine having had more fun. It truly was a fun time.

Of course, I love talking about my work and the things that inspire it, so an event like this is right up my alley. There were a few sales — none of mine… yet — so we know the space has some magic to it. 🙂

If you have the chance, drop by the gallery before November 5th and enjoy the work!!!

Photography

And the Art Is Hung

Almost two months of planning are complete, and my images are hung at Old Orchard. Hooray! The five of us met up at the gallery this morning, and spent about three hours getting our images hung. It looks great, and the images we all hung really seem to work well together — always a concern with that many different styles in one place.

Come Saturday, we’ll have our opening event — hope you can attend!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

OnOne : An Update

Man, the folks from OnOne seem to be all over this Snow Leopard issue with their license activation.

Waiting for me this morning was an e-mail from customer support (sent about four hours after I reported the problem) indicating that my license had been reset. I jumped into Photoshop, and sure enough, I was able to get my license working again.

Thank you OnOne — that’s some mammoth customer service!

Apple Existence, Photography

Snow Leopard! Genuine Fractals! Oh, the Humanity!

I was sitting around today, when my iPhone jingled, telling me that I’d received an e-mail. It was a monthly newsletter from OnOne about their products. I’m a Genuine Fractals 6 Professional user. I don’t use it real often, but when I do, I need it.

So what was the topmost bullet in the newsletter? A strong suggestion to deactivate OnOne products before upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard. Eh? Really?

And with my next breath, I realized that the newsletter was telling me that GF6 was not going to work until I contacted customer support. Period. Oh fudge. Only I didn’t say fudge.

Being in Missouri, there was a healthy dose of “show me”, and I tried GF6 in Photoshop CS4E and Lightroom 2.5… no dice. What I read was right — I was hosed.

So now I’m waiting for OnOne to respond with a hopefully painless way to salvage my investment in GF6.

Frankly, activation that is that deeply rooted in the OS seems a little overboard. The product’s great — nothing else can touch it — so I suppose it’s worth the pain, but I’m blown away that an OS upgrade can cause this kind of problem. Sure wish I’d had this info before I’d done the upgrade — and I’m betting that OnOne does too. It looks like they’re fielding quite a few questions on this one.

Stay tuned.