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Posts Tagged ‘Canon’

So the inevitable happened…I finally succumbed and bought a compact camera. Now I dislike compacts with a passion, they’re small, not ergonomic, have a very plastic feel to them even though some are made of metal, produce noisy images, don’t have much in the way of manual settings unless you get a Canon G series, and so on…
However, due to breaking my right wrist (i’m right-handed) i couldn’t lug the 50D around so i needed something smaller as a dump-in-my-jacket-pocket, take everywhere camera, and I needed it to shoot somewhat decent 720p video. In comes the Ixus 130. Knowing I wasn’t gonna demand much from it, I went for the 130 instead of the 210 touchscreen model, and I fell in love, so much so i’m thinking of ways to get my Macbook anodized in orange…

It’s got a decent build, most Ixuses do, looks amazing, especially in orange, is pretty much the size of a credit card and only slightly thicker than an iPhone, so it’s great to just have on you. The image and video quality is comparable to other cameras at the same price point. For someone who dislikes using the auto mode on anything, this little camera’s auto mode is actually impressively smart, not resorting to flash every time there’s a little less light than it would like to have.

And now for the drawbacks….it’s small and sleek, which is great if you’re just admiring it while it sits on a shelf, the surface isn’t too grip friendly and the buttons are small for my fat fingers, especially the D-pad. From what i’ve seen so far, it’s noisy above ISO 200. I do’t really know if that’s normal for a pocket camera, since so far i’ve tried avoiding them like the plague, but crank the 50D to ISO 1600 and it’ll almost beat ISO 200 on the Ixus 130. The exclusion of optical zoom in the video mode is an annoyance but I guess that at this price point Canon had to leave something out. In other words I’m eagerly waiting for CHDK to start supporting the Ixus 130.

Sample images:

Sample 720p videos:

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.

I’m a fan and avid follower of the This Week in Photography podcast. It’s a great resource for everyone interested in photograpy regardless of their level of skill but a part of a discussion they had during an interview struck me as odd. They talked about the positive change in the way camera manufacturers think and referred to things like the creative auto mode on Canon cameras.

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…

Here’s another little timelapse video. Looking forward to trying one of these at night, trouble is nobody in Stockholm bothers to kill off all the mosquitos, so being out at night is out of the question.

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.