Near disaster this week: my Seagate hardrive, repository of rougly 700 gigs of photos, suddenly stopped working. With no warning the drive disappeared from Windows, and even the bios wouldn’t recognize it. Minor panic as I realized that though I have an extra copy of every raw file on the drive (I make backups as I download each photo with Downloader Pro), I did not have backups of my photoshop files created over the last few months. Also, since I hadn’t backed up recently, restoring my download backups would mean deleting, again, raw files that I’d already examined and discarded once. Not fun. Plus recovering and organzing the backup raw files would be a pain, since the backups reside on a least three different systems.
To make a long story short, the drive was rendered inoperable by a firmware bug. Not so hot on Seagate’s part. But, much to their credit, Seagate arranged to have the drive overnighted to them — they paid for shipping and even for the cost to package the drive. A tech called me the next day, telling me that he’d fixed the firmware and that the drive was fixed and on its way back. I should be back up and running by shortly.
So, while I’m not happy about the firmware bug, I was very impressed by how well Seagate handled the repair. Doubly impressed, because I bought the drive as a “bare” OEM drive, and I expected to get a hassle about the warranty.
Of course, my images will now live on a RAID system, so I won’t lose any data even if I lose a drive. And I’ll be better (really!) about offsite backups.
I haven’t taken many photos with my iPhone. I’m a bit of a control freak – I like to set the exposure just so. Control the aperature for depth of field. Set the ISO. You can’t do any of that with the iPhone. I’m also an image quality freak. The iPhone image quality is poor, at least by “real” camera standards. But — I found a solution. Rather than futzing with fine-grained control, I’ve been using the (free) Polarize app to give up even more control. Instead of tinkering with the settings, I find an interesting subject, point, and shoot. Polarize crops on its own. It adds a vintage, retro color cast. Throws in a heavy vignette. Turns the contrast to eleven. And of course, adds the trademark Polaroid border (that can be cropped to suit). But being out of control is great for creativity, and the heavy processing hides (or maybe compliments) the iPhone’s image-quality shortcomings.
Here’s a gallery of my initial efforts – mostly abstracts around the office. (The gallery may look a little funny if you’re reading by e-mail or using an RSS reader. Long story.) Click on a thumbnail for a larger view.
Props to The Online Photographer for mentioning this great app. Major props to AP Photographer David Guttenfelder, who’s used the app for some greal, serious photojournalism with his iPhone.
I finally overcame my ambivalence about the new Canon 7D and bought one. I haven’t used it enough yet to say definitively that it has no problems with autofocus or noise, but images like this certainly make me think that the sharpness/resolution concerns are overstated. It may not be entirely apparent from this web-sized jpeg, but there is amazing detail in this Chickadee’s feathers. So far, so good.
I am still on the fence about whether to purchase a new 7D or a used ID MIII. (Note to non-camera geeks: you can stop reading now). The consensus is the autofocus works great, but the jury is still out on image sharpness and noise levels. DP Review raves about the camera. Gizmodo likes it. Darwin Wigget says the images are soft. Drew Strickland at ProPhotoHome disagrees. Wigget is still not convinced. Meanwhile, Fake Chuck Westfall is apoplectic [NSFW]. Bob Atkins, for his part, likes the camera but says the resolution isn’t as high as the megapixels might indicate.
Several reviews mention noise levels. For instance, Nick at GSM Arena also likes the camera, and says that the noise is “tolerable”:
There was a lot of commotion in the enthusiast community about the Canon 7D pixel-crammed sensor. The 15 megapixel EOS 50D was not among the Canon’s most successful products and the new 18 megapixel camera made photographers fear the worse – excessive noise without noticeable increase in resolved resolution.
The real-life results however are far from that and they are actually quite promising. The noise is well contained and has a more tolerable film-grain-like look – that’s way better than what most people expected from the most pixel-dense APS-C sensor on the market.
Scott Bourne agrees with Nick’s description of the notice as “film like” but says that the noise levels are unacceptable, at least with the current beta of Adobe Camera Raw:
I have one complaint about the camera but it may be premature. As it sits now, the 7D still images are noisy. Period. There’s no getting around it. But the possible culprit may be the lack of a finely tuned raw conversion from Adobe. I am using the beta version of ACR that supposedly supports the 7D but I can tell you it’s not there yet. There’s no way this amount of noise is acceptable. At ISO 250 I saw plenty of noise after conversion. I suspect this will be improved once Adobe finishes dialing in ACR for this specific camera.
At least he likes the autofocus, claiming that it “worked perfectly” for challenging birds in flight. I read Artie Morris’ first impressions review to express more or less the same view about the noise and the autofocus:
I finally got a chance to try the relatively new Canon EOS-7D and I gotta say that I was most impressed, especially with the all new AF system. Focus on any subject with the central sensor and recompose and the system switches sensors to stay with the originally selected subject. You can actually see the active sensor or sensors change as you track the subject. AF is fast and sure; I never once lost focus on the cranes in flight. And best of all, the resulting images are tack sharp. In the image above I started with the central sensor and the bird in the middle of the frame. Even though I moved the bird back in the frame and several other birds flew by, the AF system was not fooled into losing the original subject.
This image was created at ISO 1000. There was a bit of noise that was easily controlled with Photoshop CS3’s noise reduction.
So where does this leave me? Confused. I like my 40D a lot, but I’d sure like a bigger viewfinder, better autofocus, and maybe even a few more megapixels. But given my style of photography, lower noise levels would improve my images more than those other features, and I can make nice 13×19 prints from the 40D. I think that means I should get at 1D MIII, but . . .
I was fortunate to spend last Sunday morning shooting at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NWR with Mark and Claudia Brown. We were hoping to find the huge mule deer buck I saw the week before. We couldn’t find him, but still came away with a couple of nice images. As is apparent from a couple of these photos, I was trying hard to make a nice deer “headshot” portrait with a clean background. In retrospect, though, I think I should have tried a little wider lens for the shoot. Nonetheless, I am pleased with these images. Getting a decent background for these deer is a perennial challenge.
Mark and Claudia were nice enough to let me try their 7D’s during the trip. Wow — the viewfinder is gorgeous, and I could sure use the 18MP for my large prints. Very tempting, though Darwin Wiggett’s post about the 7D producing soft images gives me pause. I can’t quite decide whether to get a new 7D or a used 1DMIII.
Here are a couple of additional images from the trip; click on the image for a larger version:
I want one of these: Gigapan Imagaer. In a nutshell, it’s a robotic contraption that automates taking many (many, many) images that can be stitched into one very large image. (The “gig”a in Gigpan is a reference to the size of the final image — greater than 1 Billion pixels.) Think very, very big prints, easy 360 degree images, etc., all from a point and shoot camera. Sample images (including a cool gigapixel image of the Obama inaguration) here. Unfortunately it only accepts point at shoot cameras a the moment, but apparently a model for larger SLRs is on the horizon.
I am surprised to note that the robot costs ~$ 250. The designers must not realize that when a piece of hardware touches a camera, they should charge four or five times what they otherwise would. I think I’m going to buy one of these . . .
I have been hankering for a large format camera for quite some time (though admittedly, the precise reason for this desire is obscure, even to me). Something about the simple, low-tech hands-on nature of the beast appeals to me I guess.
Enter the Bulldog DIY camera kit from Camera Bellows in the UK. £151.57 (about $220 US), an assemble-it-yourself view camera kit made mostly of MDF. Add about five hours of applying glue and tightening screws, and voila, a usable large-format camera. Just add lens (likely to cost more than the camera) and some film holders.
Though the kit is not a lot less expensive than buying a used field camera on eBay, and MDF won’t look as nice as a cherrywood Tachihara, there is something appealing about building one’s camera. I just may order one of these kits.
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