The Part Where I Remember the Good Old Days..

I used a view camera, more or less exclusively, for over 20 years. I can wallow in nostalgia, but my much reduced Large Format kit sits in a drawer. it sits in a drawer almost all the time.

I do miss the accurate, loupe-up-in-each-corner, precision of a a good View Camera. I also, and this has been said by others, really miss the upside down and reversed left to right world of an image projected on a ground glass. Having a landscape image arrive upside down and reversed side to side made it an abstraction. With practice, it is easy to “fix” the projected image and imagine the final shot (or as an alternative, just look at the scene without using the camera) but the abstraction of the image was always part of the process.

The Part Where I forget the good old days – Canon TS-E Lenses

The Canon 17mm TS-E lens along with the TS-E 24mm II are best in class Tilt Shift Lenses. While Nikon may be close to the 24mm in sharpness (they don’t make anything wider so the 17mm stands alone), the Canon handely beats the Nikon mechanically with it’s ability to rotate the shift and tilt aspects of the lens independently. The 45mm TS-E and the 90mm TS-E are very good lenses as well but have not gone to “Mark II” design status and lack the independent tilt and shift feature.

If you have questions or are unfamiliar with a TS-E type lens click here for a nice review and tutorial that features the original Canon TS-E 24.

However good a tilt and shift lens is on a 35mm camera, it simply isn’t the equal of a view camera. A well made view camera had (at least) 4×5 inches of ground glass to wonder around and check for focus. A real view camera has more movements that just front tilt and shift. But I already wrote about the good old days, anyway… Shift on a TS-E lens is basically as good as a view camera, but tilt is course compared to a view camera, I use it carefully and not often. I will say that it has become better with live view. It is useful but lacking precision.

In early January, EyeFi announced that they would make available (When? I’ll  speculate late spring…) a firmware upgrade that would turn their any EyeFi X2 card into a WiFi hotspot. Your camera can now interact with any WiFi device – well any WiFi device that runs their free App. Or to quote the quick YouTube Video. “With Direct Mode full resolution Photo’s and Videos from your camera fly directly from your camera to your phone or tablet.” I would have used “transferred” rather than “fly” but I’ll give the presenter a pass – this time.

So, with an EyeFi card in direct mode and an iPod nearby I can preview my composition, including the imprecise tilt, on a nine inch screen. Since I use a Canon 1DsIII which has two card slots, I can send over a medium sized JPEG while recording the full size RAW. Nine inches of high resolution iPad screen compared to a 3 inch camera back is hardly a fair fight. Pinch to zoom should allow me to retire my well worn loop.

Problems. There Are Always Problems

I’m no fan of juggling thousands or even hundreds of dollars worth of tech so the iPad needs a good, safe home. I’d mount it high on a tripod leg and make it easy to mount and remove. I can do that using a Vogel iPad Holder and a bit of imagination. The Vogel holder also acts as a cover for the quarter acre of glass that is the front of an iPad. And, although I don’t shoot at noon, a hood might be handy. Here is one (on eBay so the link will die.) There may be others – pretty much any netbook shade should work.

Yep, it sounds a little cumbersome and fussy. But I spent 20 years under a dark cloth, 8x loop in hand, staring at the back of a view camera. I do fussy and cumbersome if the results are worth it.

Now, if the EyeFi folks would allow the app to mimic a real view camera and make it possible to reverse and flip the image…

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.

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.

Both of Canon’s big guns, the EOS-1D Mark III and the EOS-1Ds Mark III allow for lens by lens (up to 20 individual lenses – which seems reasonable) customized autofocus settings. While potentially useful for all lenses, it is particularly important for faster (f/2.8 and better) glass.

Canon outlines an iterative “point the camera and lens at a flat surface, click, check, adjust if necessary, click, check etc.” procedure. It should work. I never bothered because it seemed tedious and my lens kit is mostly the f/4 “light and good for travel” L-series. My fastest lens is the manual focus TS-E 45mm f/2.8.

Thanks to folks that understand optics far better than I, there is a second, less subjective and arguably less tedious way to calibrate your glass. This method relies on Moire patterns that result from viewing a specially constructed optical target using Liveview.

The step by step instructions are on Northlight-Images, a very nicely done site dedicated to all things Canon DSLR.

Another discussion and a similar target can be found here..

The Canon APS-H sensor, lately of the Canon 1D Mark III, with its 1.3x crop factor is looking more and more the orphan. If true, and the inference comes mainly comes from Canon USA’s inscrutable Chuck Westfall, it will be missed.

The APS-H sensor sits squarely between the full frame sensors found in the Canon 1Ds series as well as the Nikon D3, and the 1.6x crop, APS-C sensor that is found in just about every other DSLR on the planet.¹ While there isn’t quite the telephoto bump of the APS-C sensor, the 1.3x crop is kinder to wide angles.

Canon has held the 1D Mark III sensor to 10 megapixel. Physics being what it seems to be, the larger photo sites beat smaller. The combination of just a bit bigger sensor along with some welcomed restraint by Canon’s pixel packing engineers, results in image quality that is as good as a very small group of DSLR’s.

As compromises go, it’s a good one.

¹ There is a smaller yet standard for DSLR’s. The Four Thirds System format isn’t as popular as the APS-C but the small size of the sensor, along with some nice engineering, result in some very interesting products