I thought long and hard about my choice of lenses. The lens I use most often is the Sigma 18-200/3.5-5.6 IS, which is acceptably sharp at 18mm but it gets really soft at from about 150 and higher. To add to that the AF motor is pretty slow compared to Canon’s L line. For my trip last summer I decided to go with the Canon 70-200/2.8 L because I needed something sharper and faster focusing at longer focal lengths.
Now comes the dilemma. I own a crop sensor body, so do i go with EF or EF-S lenses? I currently own 2 crop sensor camera bodies, both with a crop factor of 1.6, so am I ever going to upgrade to a full size sensor? My reasoning was the following. I could get the 17-55/2.8 IS which is a great lens for the money, but it’s not weather sealed and the AF isn’t as fast as in the 24-70/2.8 L which costs about 1.5 times more. However the 24mm end of the 24-70mm puts me at about 38mm accounting for the crop factor of my sensor and this is not wide enough for some situations. IS is always good to have in a lens but I haven’t really found it to be a make or break factor. However my Sigma 18-200mm does perform well as a wide angle lens, so I decided to go with the 24-70/2.8 L instead of the 17-55/2.8 IS. I also applied the age old logic…You can’t go wrong with L glass.

At some point I’ll probably get a full frame body, but that’s going to be way down the line, so from that perspective investing in EF-s lenses seemed pointless. Also EF lenses, since they’re meant to be used with larger sensors are gonna produce better edge to edge sharpness when used on a crop sensor.

I haven’t really had the chance to test out this lens, given the cold and snowy weather we’ve been having here, although this could be an opportunity to see how the weather sealing works on both my 50D and this lens. What I did notice so far is edge to edge sharpness very much comparable to the 50/1.4 and a very limited amount of chromatic abberation. Sample images will follow in a future post.

So here it is… a short unboxing video of the Canon 24-70/2.8 L USM.

The images for this video were shot using the iPhone 3Gs. The photo apps used are PRO Hdr, Photogene, Ps Mobile and The Best Camera. The slideshow video was put together using ReelDirector. In other words this entire video from capture to web was created by a tiny pocket device most of us carry with us without even realizing its true potential.

ReelDirector will only do 640×480 output, so i’ll be posting the full-res images in the Iphone Art section.

For those of you interested the video was shot at Romme Alpin, a few kilometers away from Borlänge in Sweden.

What hit me though is how simple photographing smoke actually is when using the right gear. First of all you need something to burn, incense sticks work fine, they burn slowly and give off a constant, thick plume of smoke which can easily be shaped using different objects. I guess other things would work but the best results I’ve gotten were with incense sticks. Get ones that don’t make you nauseous, you’ll be smelling that smoke for hours….

A uniform background is another part of the equation. Anything dark will work fine. I used a large sheet of black cardboard from a local art supply store but I guess a sheet of fabric would do fine too. A matte background should be used as you want to avoid reflections.

Lighting is key here. It’s simple but it has to be done right to avoid a lot of work in post. Both constant lighting and flash are used. The constant light helps to light up the smoke creating enough contrast between it and the background for the camera to focus right. The flash is there to stop motion. Both lights need do be trained on the smoke. Getting light directly into the lens will almost certainly produce lens flare, which is not something to be avoided as long as it fits within the creative vision. Either a snoot or barn doors can be easily created out of cardboard and added to the flash. A snoot is better suited if you’ll be focusing on a smaller vertical portion of the smoke as the light will be more focused. The barn doors I made were held in place with patches of velcro, making them easily adjustable.

As the flash is off the camera it will have to be triggered remotely. This gave me a chance to test for my new Elinchrom Skyport trigger in a real-life situation. Turns out it worked without a glitch even when shooting sequences at 6.5 images/sec. The trick here is to underpower the flash so that its recycle time will be able to keep up with the camera. So with the flash in manual mode, set the power to ½. To avoid light spill directly into the lens you can also zoom in the flash anywhere from 85mm to 105mm. If you’re shooting sequences then high-speed sync should be on too. Typically the flash can sync at 1/250^th of a sec. To be on the safe side, with the camera set to manual mode you can set the shutter speed to one setting slower, so say 1/160^th of a sec. I had no problems running the flash sync at 1/250^th though; the Skyport trigger didn’t miss a beat.

To get the cleanest shot you should keep your ISO as low as possible. This shouldn’t be a problem as the amount of light that hits the smoke is controllable, you can always add more if you need to. The aperture should be set somewhere between f11 and f20. I was getting the best results at f18.

Smoke is rather unpredictable… you never really know what shape it will form, so shot a lot of frames and see what works best later on.

There is always a post-processing step, to get the right look and make the background uniform and smooth. The more contrast there is between the background and the smoke the easier it will be to correct the image. Then there’s the removal of little blemishes. The final step is to do something creative with the colors like invert the image or change the hue of the smoke. Smoke shots also work great when tiled like kaleidoscope images, mirrored in the y or x axis or rotated a certain number of degrees consecutively a few times.

So this is all it takes to kill an hour or two one lazy Sunday afternoon. The setup is simple but the images can be pretty moving. So try it for yourself….

My smoke shots are posted in my photoblog so check out the sidebar to the right.

I picked up the Elinchrom Skyport universal remote trigger kit from Fotovideo in Stockholm. For the price (1695 SEK) it seemed to be the best thing going, with its ability to group flashes. Canon’s own remote triggering system works Canon’s flashes, which can all be run as slaves so no receiver units are needed, but this system is based on IR. The Skyport is based on radio and is better in sunlight or when a flash isn’t positioned in a line of sight from the camera.  An in-depth review and a few test images are coming in a futre post. So far after 2 days of searching i’m just happy to have found a 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm mono adapter without which this trigger wouldn’t work…

I’ve never really complained much about carrying a large photo bag all day in fact i like the look and feel of a heavy camera body. But gear isn’t everything. The iPhone is by no means a replacement for my camera gear. However it provides a great way to be creative on the go without having to lug my photo backpack with me. It also limits me, in terms of flash and the lenses i can use. I find this simplicity quite relaxing and inspiring and it makes me look for other ways to make an image great. Angles, composition and mood become more important and the lack of zoom or flash although technically a restriction does not stifle  creativity. This is generally true for any type of photographic gear. It’s also a pretty good tool for macro photography, and that’s something i haven’t done much of using dslrs.

What i mean to say is that a great picture doesn’t necessarily need to come form a dslr, it can come from pretty much anything. The more portable that camera is the more you’re gonna shoot with it. Chances of getting a “once in a lifetime” shot increase because you have a camera on you at all times. The most inspiring images almost always tend to be the ones that capture the energy of the moment, and that’s hard to do if you’re gonna need time to set up a shot.

The editing apps are getting more and more powerful too. The apps i own right now can pretty much do everything i need but image compositing and multiple exposure HDR, and i’m pretty sure that that will be coming out in one way or another. Panorama stitching works flawlessly with AutoStitch. While a lot of camera phones can stitch images, this app allows you to take a matrix of images in any order and much like PS it’ll figure out what goes where and blend it together. Photogene, Photo fx and Best Camera are the apps i use for color correction/enhancements and the results are pretty great there as well. Although ColorSplash has masking capabilities i really miss this in all the other editing apps, it would be great if before applying a filter you could just paint a mask over the area the filter is to be applied to. And time-lapse, yeah there’s an app for that too. It doesn’t put the images together into movies but it’s pretty versatile with how many images and at what intervals it can shoot.

All this lead to me starting a new page titled “iPhone art” where i’ll post shots i take and edit on the iPhone. Check it out, see what you think, and be inspired to play.

For those of you who’re not familiar with this, it’s a mode that shows sliders on the lcd  so you can intuitively chose between say a blurrier or a sharper background. My understanding is that this is done to assist beginners, make them previsualise the effect they’re creating before they press the shutter while not showing actual shutter speed and aperture values. By removing number values a photographer is meant to focus more closely on the picture they’re making. This is basically meant to remove the thinking about settings factor out of photography.
Is this really a positive change from the photographer’s point of view? Getting to know your gear is the first thing you should do when you unbox it. Knowing where buttons are on a camera and being able to have one finger on the shutter and one eye looking through the viewfinder and still find buttons and change settings. In other words very few dslr users actually look at the rear-facing lcd to adjust settings. Most people i know use the top lcd and the viewfinder so placing crucual controls on the rear lcd is a bad idea from a usability perspective. Another point is that you stop thinking about little but important details such as where the sweetspot for the particular lens you’re using is or the position of the sharp portion of your image. This makes a difference between a good but not tack sharp shot and a great shot.

From a conservative point of view it’s just plain wrong. Moving from looking through the viewfinder and being able to do mental arithmetic to calculate iso, shutter speed and aperture to using sliders that make the background more or less blurry is a large paradigm shift. Granted that our digital tools allow us the luxury of not needing mental arithmetic, but that’s as far as i’m willing to go. I’m in no way conservative when it comes to technology, i love my gadgets and for the most part i’m an early adopter of new gadgets and firmwares. But photography is runs way deeper than what new firmware your camera’s using or what new functions it has. It’s an art. People were getting amazing shots with pinhole cameras made out of cardboard boxes decades ago. Now more and more people are relying on technology to take the a great image for them instead of thinking it through and really focusing on what they can do to make the image better.

Then again i’ve not seen the CA mode on Canon’s higher end cameras, only on the xxxD and the xxD series. These are cameras that either beginners or advanced amateurs buy and as such, they  need to appeal to their target audience. Features like the CA mode might be of some use for this target audience, but i’ll still argue that dumbing down the use of a camera is not going to help these people become the photographers they could be in the future. A basic, dumbed down feature set should be reserved for lower end compact cameras.

That’s about the end of my rant, comments and hate mail are welcome…

Simple huh? Well, no. Packing a photo bag is actually hard work, you have to know where every little thing is and have it easily accessible. If you’re driving your bag is gonna spend most of its time in the back seat of a car while you’re in the front so it needs to be packed so that you can one-handedly pick things out of it.

The general idea when you pack photo gear is to take as much as you can with you. Have two sets of bags, one to get the gear to wherever you are (say your hotel room) and the other to lug just the gear you need for a particular shoot. I couldn’t afford this luxury since the one bag I had, had to fit into the overhead compartment of the plane I was flying back on.

If you watch the video you’ll see that I stress the point of having as many lens cloths as you could possibly carry. This is good practice in any case but is especially important when shooting close to salty water or in areas where the prevailing winds blow in from the sea. Salt water tends to leave a sticky oily film on lenses which is really hard to get rid off. I tend to carry sensor cleaning equipment with me. It’s useful in case a major dust spot arises, but I don’t rely on it to thoroughly clean my sensor when away from home unless i’m certain that I have a nice dust-free environment I can work with.

Another point is to have a way to keep track of memory cards which have been filled up. I tend to put them back into the card compartments in my bag facing label down if the card  is full. Taking backups is a must here…i’ve never had a CF card die on me but i’m convinced it’ll happen one day. Even if I didn’t fill up my memory cards one particular day I tried to dump them onto my laptop once a day, since there I was creating two copies of everything  on separate hard-drives. This meant that I grabbed every possible chance I could to charge  whatever gadgets I had with me.

So that’s been my gear strategy, feel free to share yours…

Here’s the video:

I’ve had a 3G S for a couple of weeks now and more than put it through the paces on my recent trip to Norway. The thing simply works, it quietly does what you want it to do, if not always with stellar results it at least keeps itself way above the average. It was actually strange at first since i’ve been used to things taking a whole lot more effort when it comes to capturing and sharing media on the move (thank you LG Viewty). My main problem with the Viewty was the unresponsiveness of everything, from the phone os to the 3G connection to the shutter button lag and the final nail in the coffin which was the touch screen losing its sensitivity in some areas. The iPhone os seems really well thought out. Someone must have sat down for hours and thiught up ways to put a smile on every user’s face every time they use this device.

The camera which at first glance should be a downgrade from the LG’s 5MP with AF, actually showed better, less washed out and sharper results in spite of the worse resolution. In fact i’d almost go as far as saying that it outperforms some of the 2-3MP compact cameras i’ve owned over the years at least in good light. In low light situations there is still the issue of high noise levels but that is just technically hard to avoid due to the small sensor size that a phone camera has to have. The tap-to-focus technology Apple used works fairly accurately and i can see this becoming standard in simpler compact cameras in the future. This is a feature that would just make sense to a novice photographer, it’s simple and intuitive.

Now for the drawbacks…The lack of ergonomics of the iPhone when used as a camera is pretty evident, it was clearly built to handle like a phone/pda, not a camera. Its unstable in the hand and i just couldn’t seem to hold it well with one hand and use the camera in the portrait orientation. Landscape was less of a chore but still unstable. I used a non slip case which didn’t seem to really help matters.
I did however forget all about that when i started using editing apps, flickr uploaders and the built in youtube and mail apps. In one word, seamless. No wonder people like Chase Jarvis sing this thing’s praises!

At about 2700-3000 items in the camera roll the iPhone slowed down but only marginally, weirdly enough not when browsing through the camera roll but when using the camera. The shot to shot time became a split second longer and it also took a little longer to change from the stills to the video mode. One 7GB memory dump later that went back to normal.

Furthermore the iPhone is a great way to keep yourself organized whether it is meetings or creative ideas you’re typing into it. It’s a good tool for location scouting and note taking because it’s capable of capturing stills video and text with the added bonus of being able to upload it to the web. Now if roaming costs wouldn’t be so excruciatingly high, it would have played an even bigger part of my 2 weeks on the road.

I’ve never shied away from carrying a considerable amount of gear on a photowalk. Since i started getting heavier camera bodies and heavier glass I’ve been more aware the problems associated with heavy gear. I switched from shoulder bags to a backpack and I’ve now taken the step of replacing my camera strap with something a lot more comfortable. I ended up getting the Kata Reflex-E strap. I’ve had a look at several of these more robust straps and thought the plastic clips just seemed like something I could inadvertently open. The Kata strap on the other hand has much more solid, locking clips. The actual part that goes over your shoulder is made of neoprene making it elastic enough to absorb the jolts of the camera while walking, so if it wasn’t for the camera bumping off your stomach or hip on every step you wouldn’t really feel much weight hanging form you at all, even if you’re using a longer lens. My only issue with it is that it’s longer than the original red and black Canon strap. However it’s about twice as wide and at least twice as thick so it distributes the weight a whole lot better. But the good times don’t stop there. The clips are detachable form the actual neoprene strap and as such can be clipped onto the straps of a photo backpack to take the weight off your neck and distribute it evenly across your shoulders. Another nice detail are the two pockets, one on each end of the strap, for storing memory cards and lens cloths. This little gem goes for around 30€ and is greatly recommended.

]]> http://milnikphoto.com/blog/kata-reflex-e-strap-mini-review/feed/ 0 http://milnikphoto.com/blog/testing-the-canon-70-20028-l-usm/ http://milnikphoto.com/blog/testing-the-canon-70-20028-l-usm/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 17:57:19 +0000 Mileta Nikoletic http://milnikphoto.com/blog/?p=336

Canon 50D with 70-200/2.8 L USM

People say “I’m too poor to buy cheap stuff” and there’s a whole lot to be said about that. This is my first L lens and now I know why people sing Canon’s praises when it comes to this wonderful glass. Yeah L lenses cost a lot… but they are absolutely worth it. For anyone even remotely serious about photography, an L lens is a very good step in the right direction.

Toward the end of summer I’m planning a trip to Nordkap, Norway. There’s gonna be a whole lot of nature photography, low flying birds, possibly whales if I manage to fit a whale safari in, moose, deer and loads of open vistas. I have a wide lens for the vistas but I was lacking a telephoto zoom. The 70-200/2.8 fit right in. I decided against the IS version mostly due to the cost and the very positive reviews of the non-IS. I’m probably going to get a 1.4X extender to go with it just to add some more range.

The gist of this is that the USM motor focuses lightning-fast, the images coume out crisp, the colors are clear and maybe on the saturated side of things (at least on my screen), there’s the least possible hint of chromatic abberation even in the most high-contrast of areas and the f 2.8 aperture makes things smooth and bokehlicious. Oh and it ships with a pretty decent lens pouch and a collar for mounting it on a tripod.

I’ve had the lens for 3 days now and I put together a video with some test shots, watch it in HD. I’m not sure if it’s Imovie or Vimeo  but for some reason I haven’t been able to get rid of the pixelation on some images in the video. The images are unedited, I just imported them into LR and the exported as 100% quality .jpg.

Canon 70-200/2.8 L USM from Mileta Nikoletic on Vimeo.

Update:

What can I say… This thing is actually comparable to a prime lens. I get less chromatic aberration than with my 50/1.4 which is pretty unusual for a zoom. The range is also pretty good, Canon must have found a range vs. optical quality sweetspot here. The AF is stunningly fast and after switching to my Sigma 18-200 mm the difference in pretty much everything was very noticeable. The  build quality is the first thing that struck me, the 70-200/2.8L is built like a tank… really. Probably the single best piece of photography gear i have ever bought.