Tag Archives: Canon

Photography

Waiting Anxiously

Last week, I bought a new (to me) lens from eBay — a Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro lens — and it was supposed to be sent FedEx yesterday. I expect touchdown in the middle of the week.

This is a lens that will take my macro photography to a higher level. With it, I can blow tiny things up to five times their real size in the frame. Imagine filling a frame with something the size of a grain of rice. Or a bug’s eye. Or a dew droplet. You get the idea.

I can’t wait for this little dude to show up!

Photography

The First Five Digital Years

Having just wrapped up getting all the images from 2008 up and posted, it’s dawned on me that 2008 was my fifth full year shooting with a DSLR. I started down this path in April 2003, when I put my Canon 10D around my neck, and I’ve never looked back. I still don’t shoot nearly as much as when I first got the 10D — that year, I ran over 20,000 frames through the 10D — but 2008 saw me shooting more than I had since 2005, and that’s a really good thing.

In those five years, Becky and I have travelled many, many, many miles over land (as well as a few trip via air) to get the shots that you see here and on colin-wright.com. We’ve driven long haul trips to Colorado (2003), the desert southwest (2004), the Outer Banks (2005), Yosemite NP (2005), Smokey Mountain NP (2006) and Glacier NP/Yosemite NP (2008). We’ve taken short jaunts to Suck Creek Mountain many, many times, along with short trips to the Lake of the Ozarks and other close-by destinations. We’ve flown to Jamaica (2002 and 2003) and the Dominican Republic (2006). Through all this travel, I’ve had a Canon DSLR body nearby, and have captured so many of the wonders we’ve seen as we’ve been fortunate enough to travel.

Five years of going down this path has netted a treasure-trove of almost 75,000 images. There’s not a time that I stroll through our images without finding an image that suddenly captures my imagination. It’s been a great ride.

With that in mind, I’d like to start working on a photo book and collection, documenting some of the highlights of my first five digital years, with the expectation to get it printed/published toward late summer. At this point, this is just an idea in my head so I don’t have any details, but watch for more info here as I start nailing down some of the details.

Photography, Space

Eclipse

Tonight’s sky offered a total lunar eclipse, and I thought I’d go out and shoot it. This was the first total lunar eclipse I’d watched like this since I was a kid. I can remember sitting outside with Mom and Dad, sometime in the ’70s, watching a total lunar eclipse on a nice summer night.

Tonight was not summer-like! The temperature was 15°, with a windchill easily down near zero. It was coooold. I braved it through to totality, and enjoyed watching the show.

For shooting, I set up two cameras. I set the 20D up for a timelapse shot. I expected I would take a frame every five minutes, and then stitch ’em all together at the end, and make this great image. Well…… I sorta shot myself in the foot on that one. Midway through the shoot, I thought I had the lens on autofocus, and changed it to what I thought was manual focus. Bad move, as I had it exactly backwards, and once the lens was on autofocus, the camera wouldn’t shoot because it could get a focus lock on the very dark sky. Bummer.

The second camera was the 40D, and I put the Celestron 750mm/f6 lens on it for shooting near-fullframe images of the moon as it descended into darkness. I’d say that the biggest majority of those images were not very good. I had this set up on my Bogen trike, but even that didn’t appear to be stable enough for this big combination of lens and camera, especially in the light wind. Essentially, I got a log of blurring. I also shot some exposures, especially during totality, that were too long, causing the moon to drift in the frame…. blurring again.

So what are the lessons? Well, the first is to set manual focus on the lens while still in the house! 🙂 I’d also recommend a heavier tripod, and frankly, a motor drive would’ve been peachy. Having a drive would’ve eliminated some of the drift problems, and would’ve make the shoot much easier. I have that kind of mount on my Celestron C8, but I didn’t pull it out. That was a big mistake.

The last thing would be practice. I need to work with my equipment more for this kind of shoot, perhaps shooting the moon through its phases. That’d be a good training ground, since the shooting conditions are similar, at least up until totality. Since the next total lunar eclipse visible from North America isn’t until late 2010, I think I have some time to hone my skills!

Apple Existence, Photography

A 40D Wart

Having shot almost a week’s worth of random shots with the new rig, all is well on the rig side. The computer side… well, that’s another story.

Adobe quickly released Adobe Camera Raw 4.2 to quieten the screaming hordes that had bought a shiny new 40D, only to discover that none of the Adobe suite of products would read anything other than the jpegs coming from the camera. And all was well — jpegs and RAW files were importing just fine — or so I thought.

The problem is that ACR doesn’t work with the new sRAW files the 40D can produce, which means that neither Photoshop nor Lightroom can read ’em. These funny little files are getting a lot of press as being a quick-and-dirty RAW format for folks that don’t need big file sizes, but need some of the advantages of RAW. It’s a nifty idea that may be ideal for some folks. However, neither the Adobe line, nor my Mac’s Preview, will display them at all. Heck, the Mac still can’t display a 40D RAW file in Preview!

These are just growing pains, and this too shall pass, but you’d think that Adobe, Apple and Canon would at least have had a powwow prior to the camera hitting the street!

So, for those of you looking for images shot since I picked up the 40D, you may have to wait a bit. My automation is really tied to ACR, and if it can’t read some of the files that I’ve shot, I’ll just have to re-import ’em again, and I’d really rather not do that. Thanks for your patience!