Just a quick HDR pano

Mileta Nikoletic — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:14:42 +0000

If you’ve been following my photography you’ll have seen a fair amount of HDR images. I tend to try to not overdo the use of HDR, and by that i mean that i try to keep a certain element of the reality of the scene. However one in a while it’s fun to just play…
Here’s a HDR pan of the view from my balcony, stitched from 10 shots, in Photomatix. I tend to apply the HDR effect to each set of 3 different exposures first and then stitch them in Photoshop. I guess it would be possible to create 3 different exposures of the final panorama and then HDR them in Photomatix, but due to the extreme exposures in the -2ev and +2ev images I could never really get Photoshop to to the stitching right, which led to alignment errors in Photomatix. The final color correction is then done in Lightrrom.

You can find a larger version of this image on my Flickr page.

Canon 24-70/2.8 L USM unboxing

Mileta Nikoletic — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:16:37 +0000

After taking almost a month off from pretty much anything related to photography, I’m back with a new post. New gear really does bring with it new inspiration and that’s something I tend to be lacking this year…

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.

milnikphoto.com/blog » 24-70/2.8 L

Just a quick HDR pano

Canon 24-70/2.8 L USM unboxing