Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:28:50 GMT
There are a couple rumors floating around this morning about a new Canon dSLR, the 5D. Canon’s model numbering is reversed from most manufacturers–lower numbers signify higher-end models, so this would be a model above the current Canon 20D but below the 1D series.
The spec sheet that I’ve seen suggests that it’s a full-frame camera that takes 12.8 MP images at 3 FPS. It looks like a cross between the 20D (same AF and metering system) and the original 1DS (same sensor size and similar resolution). The rumors put the price around EUR 3500, which usually ends up meaning that B&H will be selling it for between $3000 and $3500. That’s a fantastic price for a full-frame camera, but personally, I’d probably rather buy the 1D mk II–it’s basically the same price, it has a slightly smaller sensor and slightly lower resolution, but it has 2.5x the frame rate, an amazingly fast SD interface, and it’s built like a tank.
So is this a rumor or yet another leak on Canon’s part? Generally, new Canon cameras don’t leak until a day or two before the official announcement, so we should know what they’re up to by the end of the week.
Update: According to TechWhack, the 5D will be announced on August 26th. They say that it can buffer *60* JPEG frames or 17 RAW frames. At 3 FPS, that’s 20 seconds of shooting in JPEG. If I was in the market for a new camera (which I probably would be, if I wasn’t also in the market for a new PowerBook and new phone), I’d probably at least look at the 5D, especially if they manage to get the high-ISO noise even lower this time around. The frame rate is kind of slow, but the massive buffer makes me feel a lot better about the camera.
Update: Canon has announced it. See my newer Canon 5D page for details.
Posted in Photography | Tags canon5d, photography, rumors | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 13 Jul 2005 06:02:32 GMT
I’ve been dribbling pictures from my laptop to my Flickr account for days now, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve made a dent in the backlog. I just posted pictures from Sophie’s first birthday. She’s almost 2½ now; the pictures have been sitting on my laptop unsorted for almost 18 months. Every time I burn through another batch of ancient pictures I feel even better about Flickr.
I’m making progress on my PictureSync problems. Apparently the reason that it wouldn’t save my Flickr password as a conflict with a version of PictureSync that I tried out last October. There was some weird remnant from the old PictureSync still sitting in my keychain that I couldn’t figure out how to delete, so I renamed my Flickr account in PictureSync from ‘Flickr’ to ‘Flickr (Scott)’, and now everything works. There are still a couple weird AppleScript bugs that pop up from time to time, but it’s usable now. I’ll probably send the shareware payment off tomorrow and hope that the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.
I’ve also been playing with 1001, an OS X interface to Flickr from the author of ecto, my favorite blog editor. I set it up on my wife’s Mac mini so she can see the pictures that I put on Flickr automatically. I also installed 1001’s Flickr screensaver on her Mac–it’s kind of cool to see pictures that I posted a half-hour ago show up on her screen all on their own. Once I have a few more pictures up, I’ll start pushing Flickr on random family members; it seems like the perfect way to share family pictures in our increasingly widely distributed family.
In fact, the whole social-networking aspect of Flickr has taken me by surprise. I’ve already had a couple old friends pop up out of the blue. There’s a lot more interconnection in Flickr contacts then I would have expected. It’s not six degrees of separation: it’s two or three degrees at most.
Weird example–1001’s home page has a few example pictures, and the last one looked kind of familiar to me. I haven’t seen the picture before, but the guy on the left looks a lot like Boris Mann; Boris and I have been swapping comments on each other’s blogs for quite a while now. A bit of searching and I found the original picture of Boris and Roland Tanglao. Even though I’ve never actually met Boris, I’ve met at least three or four of the people on his Flickr contacts list and I read the blogs of several others. I picked a few other people on his contact list and looked at their contact lists, and I kept finding more people I knew. I’m not sure if this is all that useful, but it’s certainly interesting, and it’s given me a chance to see a lot of fascinating pictures.
It makes me want to go out and shoot something interesting. Over the past year, probably 95% of my photography has been pictures of family and friends; they’re important to have, but they aren’t very exciting. Unfortunately, they’ve been all that I’ve had time to take recently. Now that I’ve started clearing up the old backlog, maybe I’ll have time to take more pictures for the fun of it, not just because we need pictures from some random family gathering.
Posted in Photography | Tags flickr, photography, picturesync, socialnetworking | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 11 Jul 2005 06:53:24 GMT
My poor laptop’s hard drive has been filling up with unprocessed photos again, so I took a couple hours this morning to organize things and offload them to my home fileserver. I’ve never been all that happy with my web-based photo gallery, but I haven’t been willing to spend the week or two that it’d take to write something better, and I haven’t found an open-source gallery program that works any better for me then what I have now.
Sophie looking cute
So, I decided to give Flickr another try. Part of this was motivated by the Typo’s Flickr sidebar plugin–it’s the closest thing I can get to photo gallery/blog integration, and that’s something that’s been on my to-do list for around two years.
Rusty and Colton at Whistler
Since I use iView Media Pro for organizing my photos, I wanted to find something that could automate the process of getting pictures from iView into Flickr. A bit of searching found PictureSync, which isn’t perfect, but it works well enough for now. I can select a block of pictures in iView and drag them to PictureSync’s icon, and it will convert them to sRGB, scale them down, extract metadata from iView to stuff into Flickr tags, and then upload the whole batch. Unfortunately, it seems to have keychain issues that force me to re-create my Flickr upload settings every time I run it, and it’s not all that great at extracting metadata from iView’s “people” field. Still, it’s easier to use PictureSync and Flickr then it was to copy files to my server and re-run my make-album script, and that’s good enough for me.
Extreme cyclist at Whistler
So, I paid Flickr $25 to upgrade my account to “pro” status, which ups my upload limit from 20 MB to 2 GB and started uploading blocks of pictures. It’s going kind of slowly (550 MHz G4s aren’t all that great at resizing multi-megabyte images), but there’s no way around that for now. Eventually, I’ll probably write a Ruby upload script to work around the problems with PictureSync, and then I’ll be able to do uploads from a faster Linux box, but I’m pretty happy with what I have for now. It’s good enough.
A Walrus at the Zoo
In celebration of getting out of the photo hosting business, here are a few random pictures. First, Sophie looking cute, then my brother and his youngest son, my family watching a walrus at the zoo, and a mountain biker in Whistler.
Posted in Photography , Blog stuff | Tags flickr, photography | 6 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 12 May 2005 18:16:12 GMT
I just received a message from Phase One about a new version of their Capture One RAW-image processing software. Hidden in the release notes is this little gem:
The batch queue limitation of 20 images have been removed from LE.
The last time I tried Capture One, I loved the output, but the 20-file limitation made it worthless for me, and the price jump to go from the $99 LE version to the $499 Pro version is just too big for me to justify. So, I didn’t buy it. I’m going to re-consider it now that the LE version is actually useful.
Posted in Photography | Tags captureone, photography, raw | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:58:24 GMT
The Luminous Landscape has a feature up by Doug Brown of torontowide.com showing some of the less obvious things that you can do with multi-shot digital panoramas. I tend to read The Luminous Landscape once or so per week; the primary author has some interesting opinions on camera gear, but I’m not a big fan of most of his images.
The panorama article is an entirely different kettle of fish. I’m in awe of most of the shots. Somehow he’s managed to create panoramic action shots using an ancient Olympus E10. The framing and lighting are great, and the panoramic format gives everything a very different feel then most journalistic shots of similar topics. It just goes to show that the photographer matters a lot more then the tools he uses.
This leaves me itching to go shoot panoramas. I guess I need to go look for OS X panorama stitchers–the last time I looked, it was a lot easier to stitch photos in Windows then on the Mac.
Posted in Photography | Tags panarama, photography | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:20:21 GMT
By general consensus among photographers, B&H Photo and Video is one of the best places to order camera gear. They’re cheap, honest, and fast, and they carry everything. According to the EOS mailing list, they just suffered a big warehouse fire. A local station has details.
Posted in Photography | Tags bandh, fire, photography | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 23 Nov 2004 18:23:57 GMT
ProLab, Seattle’s second-largest pro film lab is closing their film processing and printing business. According to the Seattle P-I, the shift to digital has gutted not only their film processing, but also the demand for custom prints. Apparently people have noticed that a $2 8x10 from Costco with Dry Creek Photo’s profiles is pretty much the same as a $10 8x10 from a pro lab. With film, you’re pretty guaranteed that cheap places like Costco will scratch your film, screw up processing it, and leave it coated with gunk, but with digital that’s irrelevant.
So where does this leave the pro labs? For ProLab at least, they’re sticking with larger-format printing for advertising displays. Both ProLab and Ivey have been concentrating on this market for years, and it’ll probably serve them well for years to come, while traditional film printing fades into memory.
Posted in Seattle, Photography | Tags film, photography, seattle | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 22 Sep 2004 22:59:14 GMT
Since all of the big Photokina camera announcements seem to be out (Canon 1Ds, Nikon D2X, Fuji S3, and a couple thousand point-and-shoots), I figure it’s time for me to post my list of what I’d like to see the camera industry provide. I’ve been thinking about most of these for years. In that time, I’ve seen new cameras come and go, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of real innovation, particularly in the DSLR space, where all of the manufacturer’s effort has been focused on image size and speed.
None of these ideas are mind-bogglingly fantastic; some of them are admittedly a bit marginal. Some of them may well be bad ideas–I’d be amazed if at least some of these haven’t been tried out in the labs and found wanting. I haven’t seen any of these discussed widely online, though, so I figured I should probably share them.
Read more...
Posted in Photography | Tags bluetooth, flash, photography, predictions | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 15 Sep 2004 21:02:27 GMT
I’m a Canon guy, but one of my Nikon friends forwarded me some specs for Nikon’s latest DSLR, the D2X. Allegedly, these were released by Nikon Denmark:
- 12.4 MP, 5 FPS, 16 shot raw buffer
- reduced-frame 6.8 MP, 8 FPS, 29 shot raw buffer
- Everything else basically similar to the current D2H.
The specs seem kind of weird to me–the buffer size and frame rates are closer to a sports camera (like the D2H) then a studio camera. The buffer sizes, particularly, seem aimed at people shooting lots of frames in a row, which isn’t the market the the DnX series has went after in the past. On the other hand, having a dedicated mode that only uses the center pixels of the image chip sounds like a decent way to please sports shooters–you get higher magnifications, which is fine when you’re using long lenses anyway, higher frame rates, and smaller files, all in one.
I’d wait to see official confirmation of this before I thought about ordering one. Of course, I’m not really in the market for a new Nikon.
Comparing the D2X to Canon’s two top-end cameras in interesting:
- The 1Ds (11 MP, 3 FPS) is slower with slightly lower resolution, but it has a much larger imaging chip which gives it better wide-angle performance and probably lower noise levels. Also, the 1Ds is rumored to be replaced soon.
- The 1D mk II (8 MP, 8 FPS) is in between the two D2X modes. It’s higher resolution then the lower-resolution mode and faster then the high-resolution mode. It also has a larger imaging chip, which gives better wide-angle performance, and a larger buffer.
Most likely, Canon will introduce a 1Ds mk II in a week or two, and Nikon’s new body will be left by the wayside again, just like the D2H was when the 1D mk II came out.
Posted in Photography | Tags d2x, nikon, photography | 7 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:51:42 GMT
PhotographyBLOG mentions that Ilford is having trouble. I was a big fan of their black and white film for a while; I loved Delta 3200, even though it was happier at 1200-1600 then at 3200. Most of my favorite B&W shots were on Delta 3200.
They’ve apparently been pushing their way into digital photography with a line of paper products, and they’re a big OEM supplier of inkjet ink, but that doesn’t change the fact that their traditional product line is dying.
I’d love to have the time and money to shoot black and white film, but I’m happy enough with the results of running digital images through Photoshop’s channel mixer, and it lets me deal with color filters after I shoot, not before. Maybe someday I’ll get a 4x5 camera and go back to B&W, but it’s not going to be this decade.
Posted in Photography | Tags ilford, photography | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 18 Aug 2004 12:36:18 GMT
It looks like Canon is just about to announce a new DSLR. I can’t find the specs on their website yet, but they’ve posted a press kit full of pictures. There are some specs floating around on the net:
- EOS-20D
- 8.2 MegaPixels
- DIGIC II
- 1:1.6x Crop
- 9 Point focusing
- 1/8000s Max Shutter speed
- 5fps Continuous speed
- 25 frame buffer
- EF-s support
- E-TTL II support
- 0.2sec startup time
- 50g lighter than 10D
I’m not sure what’s up with the AF system, but the rest of the specs look just about right to me. I’d love a camera with a slightly faster frame rate then my D60, about twice the buffer capacity, and faster startup times, and that’s about what this provides. They even threw in a couple extra pixels, not that it really matters. The rumored price is $1,600 MSRP, $1,300 street, which is pretty good. The official announcement is due on Friday.
There’s also a rumor of a 10-22 EF-S zoom. EF-S lenses only work with the 300D (“Digital Rebel”) and the new 20D, so the new lens isn’t very useful on my D60, but wow–10mm is wide. Sigma and Nikon both make 12-24mm zooms, but 10mm is a new record, at least on a 35mm-like body. Unfortunately, since the Nikon 12mm zoom is over $1,000 and the Sigma is up around $700, the Canon lens will probably be kind of pricey.
Posted in Photography | Tags canon20d, photography, rumors | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 10 Aug 2004 20:50:42 GMT
This is so cool. Boing Boing is reporting that Stamps.com has launched a custom photo stamp printing site, photo.stamps.com. For around $1 per stamp, you can have them make custom US postage stamps for you. Here’s a quick sample, using one of the images from the wedding I shot a couple weeks ago:
Just the thing for thank-you notes.
Posted in Photography , Toys | Tags photography, stamps | 5 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 07 Aug 2004 06:08:12 GMT
Last weekend’s wedding pictures are completely sorted and adjusted in C1. The last batch of them is now processing. All in all, I ended up with 292 images. I was aiming for 200, but at this point, I don’t have time to find another 92 to remove. It’s easier to just spend the time and money to process and print proofs of the extra 92 frames.
Actually, that’s cheating slightly–there are around a dozen shots that I want to open up in Photoshop and convert to B&W. That shouldn’t take long though, and I can’t do that until C1 finishes rendering another 1,400 of so images–fill-size TIFFs and web JPEGs for the final 98 frames, plus 4 different printable color-corrected JPEGs for all 292 images.
I really enjoy photography, and shooting weddings in particular, but the image editing time is killing me. That seems to be a common sentiment among photographers.
Posted in Photography | Tags photography, wedding | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 02 Aug 2004 14:35:00 GMT
As mentioned a while back, I shot another wedding this weekend. This was the first wedding that I’ve really enjoyed shooting–it was outdoors in Kirkland early in the day, the weather was great (if a bit bright for outdoor pictures), and everyone was happy to be there. Somehow, this felt smaller and more laid back then my sister’s dinky island wedding in Antigua a couple years ago, and that’s saying something. The couple clearly belongs together, and their family and friends were there to celebrate it. That’s supposed to be the point of the whole affair, but it’s been known to get lost in the middle of all of the planning.
Now that the wedding’s over, I have 750 or so pictures to take care of. That’s an improvement over the 2,000 frames that I shot at each of the two previous weddings, but I was shooting for 600. I’ll blame the happy couple and their family–I couldn’t resist the urge to take a couple extra shots here and there.
I’ve been using PhaseOne’s C1 image-processing software to process images from the wedding, and I’m mostly happy. It’s reasonably fast, easy to use, and it produces great images. I’m really impressed with the tools that it provides for tweaking your images without requiring you to jump into Photoshop.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that the cheap model, C1 LE, isn’t going to cut it for processing 750 wedding pictures. It’s limited to processing 20 pictures at a time in the background, and it can only spit out one type of output file per input file. So, late last night, I downloaded the C1 Pro trial version, and it seems quite a bit more useful–it’ll let me batch up hundreds of images at a time for overnight processing, and I’m having it spit out a full-resolution 16-bit TIFF file, a half-resolution web JPEG, and a set of color-corrected 4x6, 5x7, and 8x12 JPEGs for a local lab, all automatically.
That left just one little problem–C1 seems to leak memory. It’s currently using 335 MB of RAM on my laptop, and the total’s growing. It makes it really hard to leave C1 running in the background while I work on other work. I guess that’s the price of progress.
Posted in Photography | Tags captureone, photography, wedding | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 30 Jul 2004 01:50:29 GMT
I just received some very pleasant vendor email–the “LE” level of PhaseOne’s C1 DSLR raw image processing software is now available for OS X. C1 comes in 3 flavors: LE, SE, and Pro. The SE ($250) and Pro ($500) versions have been available for the Mac for a while, but not the LE ($99) version. I’ve been tempted to buy C1 for a while, but I just can’t see paying $250 for it. If I was a Windows user, then I’d have bought the LE version a year or so ago.
I’m off to download the free trial…
Posted in Photography | Tags captureone, macosx, photography | 2 comments
