Things Digital. Mostly Photographic

I have rented lens’ from Lens Rentals.com and nothing but good things to say about them.

As I wondered through all the exotic glass, I apparently missed a series of well written and wide ranging articles that date back to September of last year.

With topics ranging from the mundane, “Purchasing a Ballhead”, to the sublime, “Canon’s Error 99: the Man the Myth”, and the important “Lens Repair Data 3.0″ this is a growing collection of well written information that stands out from the opinionated but mostly fact-free crowd. These folks actually buy, test and have folks like me abuse rent a huge number and collection of lenses by all the major manufacturers.

Highly reccommended.

Iceland has found itself in the news for all the wrong reasons this past few months.

Iceland’s economic miracle turned out, like so many others of late, to be little more than hyper-leveraged fiction. While the boom times are over, Iceland remains a place of uncommon beauty and uncommon people.

So, as an antidote to the endless stream of cliched images of Icelanders waiting outside for the (pick one of three) failed Bank to open I offer a collection of (mostly) coastal Iceland landscapes.

There are many folks, some more reasonable than others, who have faulted Canon for using the same 9-point autofocus layout in the new/real-soon-now 5D Mark II as the current/previous 5D.

This superb image set of Our New President, Our New Vice President and their Families, before and during the Chicago Victory Speech were taken with the original 5D by David Katz/Obama for America. As I write this, over 1.25 million folks have viewed some or all of these 82 images. I will wager that not one of them thought, “boy, if there were more autofocus points and they were more widely dispersed, these would have been even better.” Not one.

But there is always the next toy. The original 5D’s LCD, now nearly three years old, can makes it sometimes seem more like a film camera with histograms. It is not water tight. The frame rate is pitifully slow…

…and it has a sensor that is (still) as good as any and better than most. Despite all the nattering, in the right hands the 5D shines. The Canon EOS 5D is, still, an excellent general purpose tool. It will remain, for some time to come, a better camera than most of us are photographers.

Landscape photography is, as I discovered most of 25 years ago, nothing more than being a good technician, a passable artist and, most importantly, being there, set up and ready to shoot. These are the minimum qualifications. The ideal is to transcend the first two and to work hard in order to do so as often as possible.

f/8 and be there. With some lenses, f/11 and be there… If you hauled in a view camera, f/22 and be there…

A shooting day starts early, silly early, and ends only after the sun has set, the sky has gone dark, and a place has been found to spend the night. The middle of the day, when light is irredeemable, is spent looking for pictures, catching up on paperwork, planning, napping (see getting up early and going to bed late above) and traveling from here to there (the photography is almost always better there than it is here.)

Even as I’ve gone away from film and towards digital, the rhythm of shooting landscapes has barely changed.

A Very Simple Digital Workflow for the Landscape Photographer

1. Shoot exclusively in RAW. There are reasons to shoot JPEG but landscape photography is surely not one of them.
2. A bad memory card will cause heartache. Buy name brand memory cards and buy them in intermediate sizes. I’ve settled on 8 Gb Sandisk Ultra III for both Compact Flash and SDHC cards. No failures after thousands of frames.
3. A lost memory card will cause even greater heartache. Store them in a safe, dry place with two zippers between the card the outside world. Three zippers is better. Four zippers will, sooner than later, piss you off. Open the zippers to get to your card stash and, now this is where some folks get confused, close all the zippers when you are done.
4. As an aside… Cameras that write to multiple cards only seem expensive.
5. Back up your work each and every day.
6. I back up onto two Hyperdrive Space memory card backup devices. The Hyperdrive Space is a simple, relatively cheap and, very importantly, fast device. I use two because every hard drive every made has or will fail. I bought mine as empty cases and currently have Seagate 160 Gb hard dives installed. This is far cheaper than buying them with hard drives pre-installed.
7. One of the Hyperdrives stays with me at all times. The other Hyperdrive is always separate and as well hidden as I know how.
8. I rotate through my three sets of memory cards. This gives me, for a day or two, a third back up for the most recent image files.

I got sucked in…

Normally I have the good sense to steer clear of photography forums. Too often these are the hangouts of folks with firmly held opinions unencumbered by facts.

I’m more of a facts type of guy.

The 5D Mark II seems to have brought out all the usual suspects. Among the poorly reasoned arguments and tortured logic presented as facts is the persistent complaint that Canon was wrong to put a 21 MP sensor in the 5D Mark II. Except for landscape shooters and maybe some commercial types, no one needs that many pixels. In an homage to all that Nikon can serve up at the moment, the consensus seemed to be that 12 MP is, and will continue be, all that most folks need.

I currently shoot with a 21 MP 1Ds Mark III and also shot the original 12 MP 5D for most of two years. Assuming that Canon has retained the image quality of these two cameras (and early samples seem very promising) it is my experience that more pixels are better than fewer.

I hate dislike vertical 3:2 aspect ratio images. It is, more often than not, just too damn tall. I much prefer the a traditional 4:5 vertical crop.

21 MP gives you the luxury of tossing pixels out and doing so without remorse. The standard 5624 x 3736 pixel 1Ds3 capture is reduced to 4887 x 3736 when cropped to 4:5. The crop results in a 50 megabyte tiff file. The math is far less favorable to a 12 MP camera. The original 5D starts at 4372 x 2906 pixels and drops to 3310 x 2650 when cropped to 4:5. The cropped tiff weighs in at 25 MB.

Similar arithmetic applies to horizontals. Here 3:2 is tolerable but something more like 2:1 or it’s close HD cousin 16:9 look even better.

For the folks who just can’t seem to afford all the storage that larger RAWs and JPEGs produce. With one terabyte bare drives costing $160 or less, storage is the cheapest thing in my photographic ecosystem.

And if you are still unconvinced. Canon feels your pain. In addition to two reduced size JPEG sizes, the 5D Mark II has two pint sized RAW file sizes. sRAW1 is a 10 MP capture and, in an homage to the omnipresent web banner, sRAW2 weighs in at 5.2 MP.