Spent a fun day exploring Roxborough State Park, west of Denver. Photographic highlight though was a magnificent storm over the Boulder Flatirons, just as the sun was setting.
Tokyo wide open
Canon’s 50mm f/1.0L is a one of a kind optic – the fastest autofocus lens ever manufactured. You can’t buy one new – it’s been replaced with a slightly slower and considerably cheaper f/1.2 lens – but there are still plenty around second hand and via rental houses. Visiting Tokyo for a brief work trip I thought it would be fun, and maybe instructive, to limit myself to just this one lens and see what sort of dreamy, “Lost in Translation” look I could manage amidst the Tokyo neon.
The advantage of the f/1.0 is, self-evidently, its speed. The chief disadvantage is cost, cost and size. The two disadvantages are cost and size and focus speed. The three disadvantages are cost, size, focus speed and corner sharpness. Among the many disadvantages are
Tokyo
Back from a week in Japan. More photos to come but as a teaser
The Scottish Highlands
A quick trip through the Scottish Highlands over Spring Break
Boulder Flatirons dawn
Busy month at work including a few days with early starts to join video conferences on the East Coast. Not much fun, but I did get to see a couple of sunrises on the Flatirons from my office
Pawnee Buttes, Colorado
New cameras: what we’ll get vs what we want
It’s been a pretty quiet year or two in the Canon world, at least for those of us who aren’t in the market for Cinema EOS. Nikon, Panasonic and Sony have all announced or shipped some distinctively different cameras (the Nikon Df, Sony A7r, Panasonic GH4), while from Canon we’ve had the 6D (protecting their position at the low end of full frame) and a bunch of low-end Rebels. Even going back a bit further, the 5D3 – currently my main camera – was undoubtedly a less dramatic introduction than Nikon’s D800. So I’ve been mulling over what we might expect from Canon this year, along with what I might actually want, given that the 5D3 satisfies pretty much all my current photographic needs.
What we’ll likely get from Canon is probably the easier question to answer. Nikon and Canon remain, for now, a virtual duopoly in the market for high-end cameras, and duopolies stay that way by paying close attention to each other’s moves. By all appearances the Nikon D800 has been very successful, so the chances of the next Canon full frame body having a substantially higher pixel count must be high. Whatever Canon might espouse about 18 or 22MP being the “right” resolution for full-frame, they’ll surely seek to stop Nikon having a monopoly on a high resolution body as soon as it’s technically feasible (all of Canon’s current full-frame sensors are apparently manufactured on a less than state-of-the-art 0.5 micron process). Likewise dropping the anti-aliasing filter hasn’t led to howls of complaint from Nikon D800E or Sony A7r users, and I’d expect Canon to follow suit. The logic of Canon’s own recent products (the 6D and 70D) says we’ll get phase detection on the sensor, built-in WiFi (and maybe GPS), and 4k video. The last might get delayed a generation to continue to differentiate the 1DC, but with the GH4 on the way it’s virtually certain the flagship Cinema EOS DSLR will go upmarket, perhaps with RAW, 10 bit color, Apple ProRes codec, or similar features appealing to the video crowd. On the lens front there’s been quite a bit of innovation lately, but there are still plenty of “L” lenses awaiting their makeover to make them sharper wide open for current digital bodies. More telephotos with built-in extenders is also a pretty safe bet.
Just this me-too and evolutionary stuff would actually be pretty useful, even if it’s not very exciting. As I’ve mentioned before, I was struck over the summer by how obvious an edge the D800E has over the 5D3 in resolution, even when shooting handheld with high consumer-grade glass. I’m also plenty happy to let video cognoscenti pull focus manually, and switch to autofocus enabled by phase detection in live view and video modes. As for 4k, I’d rather play with 120fps slow motion, but we’ll probably get both as a package.
What we won’t get is also predictable. If Canon and Nikon perceive any threat from Sony, and possibly others, launching serious mirrorless cameras, that threat is most likely to come from the inherent cost advantages of simpler systems rather than better image quality or even lower weight. So we won’t see any additional mechanical complexity being added to DSLRs, even if built-in ND filters say would be a nifty feature for video. I also don’t see a “Canon Df” as being very likely – nostalgic Canon types already had their hearts broken way back when Canon dumped the FD lens mount.
What I want is trickier. My 5D2 had an achilles heel – it broke when I tried to use it hiking the Berg Lake trail in heavy rain – but the 5D3 handles the photographic situations I’ve personally encountered satisfactorily. What I most want is some Steve Jobs-like innovation I don’t know I want! In the category of disruptive changes, I’ve read enough favorable reports about the Sigma Merrill cameras, from people whose opinions I respect, to be interested in a body with a non-Bayer multi-layer sensor. I’d certainly sacrifice a stop of high ISO performance for what is said to be a subtler color rendition. Three stops? Well at that point I’m not so sure. I’d also like to see a hybrid viewfinder. The recent addition of grid lines and electronic levels into the viewfinder is already a very useful feature, but more broadly the whole raison d’
A star trail panorama
Took advantage of co-operative weather this weekend to have a first go at a star trail panorama, at Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. I’ve visited this place many times: it’s beautiful, dark, and close to a huge parking lot that so I could retreat from the cold and wind while the cameras were firing away. The setup went as planned, though with two DSLRs mounted to the rail tripod stability was not great. I packed snow around the legs to try and cut down on vibration. For star trails dark frame subtraction is a no-no, so I set the exposure at what was intended to be a balance between depth and noise – 30s, f/3.5, ISO 1600. Once it got dark enough (for future reference that’s about an hour after sunset) I locked down remote releases and retired to the car for dinner! (Not without some irrational unease at abandoning all this gear in the backcountry.)
I ran for two and a half hours, with the Moon in the sky to illuminate the peaks for the last half hour. The result was a set of 280 images from each camera, which were processed in Lightroom and stacked with StarStaX as usual. The nearly full Moon proved to be pretty bright, so I used only about two hours of exposure. Here are the individual stacks.
Pointing ultra-wide lenses up toward the sky gives a lot more distortion that I’d realized, and despite the generous overlap Autopano Pro balked at stitching this automatically. The problem was mostly noise and a lack of clear features in the foreground, and the stitch improved dramatically after I added back the EXIF data (removed by StarStaX), lightened the foreground, and applied noise reduction before stacking. Even then the stars were a mess, but that’s easily fixed by adding manual control points to the sky.
I reckon more sky and less foreground would have been better, and even thought as much while setting up. But I wimped out seeing the unexpected distortion and fearing that my tripod might topple in the wind if pointed any further skyward. Happy with the result for a first effort though!
Stitching images shot at different focal lengths
This is a test. This is a test
Rome
Saw in 2014 with a long weekend in Rome. As you may have heard there’s quite a lot to see and do in Rome, so on this, my first visit, I was mostly occupied with the famous historical sites. Well known or not, the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the rest are incredible.
I shot everything with the Canon 5D3 and 24-70 f/2.8L lens, hand held, stitching where necessary. It’s a good combination for church interiors and night scenes. In practice, ISO 12,800 seems pretty clean and potentially useable for a good-sized print, while 25,600 is OK but a stop too far without serious work on noise reduction.