Michael Creasy's blog : Photography

David Burnett on digital photography

mcreasy — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 06:27:00 GMT

David Burnett talks to the New York Times on what cameras he uses and why he mainly shoots digital now - he's another Canon 20D user. The article is interesting, but the audio slideshow is much more interesting. He explains that he uses a number of different cameras depending on the type of photo he's going for and on the slideshow there's a few examples.

I love my 20D, but it's not a camera that I can use all the time, it's just too big, so I also have a Canon SD500 which I've mentioned before. I'll get different types of photos from each camera; I can't do the same things with the SD500 that I can do with the 20D, but I can take it places a 20D just isn't appropriate. It's hard to be inconspicuous with a large SLR camera and buy the time I've tweaked the settings the moment is lost. The SD500 I use for more spontaneous photos, I don't mess with the settings, just accept the defaults and let the camera deal with the situation and most of the time it does a great job, probably better than I could have done manually. Take this as an example - that was shot at dawn directly into the rising sun with the SD500 and captured the scene exactly as I wanted it. The 20D on the otherhand lets me get photos like this, which the SD500 wasn't able to manage (subjects lit entirely by candle light on a moving boat). The SD500 also shoots video, a feature I never thought I'd use as I've always prefered still shots, but I found a few instances when video captured a scene much better than a still image could. The 20D as you'd expect from an SLR doesn't capture video. Different tools for different jobs.

The New York Times also has some tips on digital photography, nothing really new to me there, but it might be off interested to any just getting into digital.

Canon SD500 first impressions

mcreasy — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:56:00 GMT

I've always owned Canon cameras and was looking around for a new small digital camera and decided on the Canon SD500. I haven't had a small camera for a few years - the last being a Canon S100 (the original digital Elph/Ixus) which I enjoyed using. My goal with this camera is to be a companion to my digital SLR mainly for use when carrying the SLR isn't practical, so this is more of a backup camera.

First, the basics. The SD500 is small. It's about the size of a deck of cards. Small doesn't mean featureless though, it has a resolution of 7.1 megapixels and a 3x optical zoom. Storage is via an SD card.

What's in the box? Just the basics that you would expect, a USB cable, battery and an A/V cable. There isn't an included cases which is a shame as the camera looks like it could get scratched easily and it would be nice to have something to protect the large LCD on the back of the camera. Canon do sell an accessory kit though which is highly recommended as it includes a case and a battery which can often be purchased for less than the cost of the battery.

Canon include a 32 megabyte SD card with the camera which will store just 9 photos at the highest resolution and quality. A 1 gigabyte card will hold about 360 images.

The camera is pretty easy to use with an intuitive menu system operated with the buttons on the back of the camera. When turning the camera on you'll be greeted with an irritating noise from the internal speaker, thankfully this can easily be disabled in the customization menus, which also allow you to change the noise made when a photo is taken (a shutter sound is just fine thank you) and the background picture displayed when turning the camera on - not a feature I'd ever care about. Startup time is good, the camera is ready to be used almost straight away, which wasn't the case for earlier models. The LCD displays is large and bright and gives a good impression of the final output of a photo.

The camera has a 3x optical zoom and a digital zoom which much to my surprise was disabled by default on the camera. I've never been a fan of digital zoom and it's nice to see Canon encouraging people not to use it by disabling it by default. It's far better to zoom and crop on a computer than it is on the camera.

Picture quality is impressive so far. I haven't taken many pictures yet, but I have no complaints with the output. The camera supports USB2.0 so transfers to a computer are nice and fast - just as well with the size of the files produced.

There are a few features I want to also mention:

Stitch assist mode. This is a great feature. When activated the camera gives you the option of taking photos from left to right or right to left; after the first photo is taken the result is shown on the LCD display, but shrunk so you can frame your next shot against the previous shot. The camera does not attempt to stitch the photos together for you, but guides you so that you can see what you've taken so far and don't miss part of the panorama you are shooting.

Scene assist mode. There are a number of presets pre-programmed with general styles of photo such as "night" "portrait" etc. The camera adjusts the settings automatically to be the best for that style of shot. Useful for quick photos that you don't have time to manual configure settings.

That's it for my first thoughts; I'll post some more once I've used it a bit more.

OT: Photo from this weekend

mcreasy — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 03:08:00 GMT

I won't make a habit of this, but I wanted to share a picture I took this weekend at the Pike Place Market in Seattle. I love how it's come out.

Here's the techincal details: Canon 10D with a Canon 17-40mm L lens. Settings were ISO 400, lens was at 17mm, shutter speed of 1/20th of a second and aperture at F/4.

Improving "My Pictures"

mcreasy — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 17:59:00 GMT

eHomeUpgrade talks about how to improve the My Pictures experience in Media Center.

There's some good ideas there. Some that I've thought of before and would like to see and some that I haven't. They noticed that a slideshow always starts with the same photo which annoys me as well, but I've learnt to live with it. They mention meta-data on photos, which is a good idea, but I already keep my photos organised by folder which does most of what they suggest.

There's a suggestion of a My Art feature - I think this is what Gallery Player is targeted at. It's now in Online Spotlight.

I've been thinking of doing some work on my personal website to make it display photos differently when viewed from Media Center. Maybe I'll work on that this weekend. The pages are written in ASP.NET so I can easily customise it to do something different for Media Center.

Who has some great ideas about how My Pictures could be improved?

Addendum to my Canon i9900 printer review

mcreasy — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:39:00 GMT

I've had my Canon i9900 for a while now and I've noticed the colour output isn't what I'd expect. Initially I suspect there was a setting I needed to adjust and I experimented trying to fix it, but to no avail. I contact Canon and they had me tweak all the settings and it still made no difference. Finally I ran a test myself - I created an image with a gray square (RGB(204,204,204)) and printed it out at the default settings - the result was a blue square. I told the printer to print it in grayscale and got the expected gray square. I sent a photo of the output to Canon which convinced them something was wrong and they told me to take it to a local service center. I was prepared to do that until I noticed on their website that the printer is covered by an “InstantExchange” program. I asked them about this and they apologised for the confusion and I should receive a replacement printer in a few days. They told me to keep the print head though, which is a slight concern as what do I do if the fault is in the print head?

If anyone has some recommendations for glossy 13”x19” photo paper I'd like to hear it. Canon's Glossy Photo Paper is good, but I prefer the look I get when using the 8 1/2” x 11” Photo Paper Plus Glossy which doesn't appear to be available in 13”x19”. If you've used their Photo Paper Pro 13”x19” I'd be interested to hear what you think.

Canon i9900 review

mcreasy — Fri, 21 May 2004 19:19:00 GMT

I've always had good experiences with Canon printers so I was excited earlier this year to hear they would be releasing a new wide format bubblejet printer - the i9900. I'd been thinking of buying a wide format printer for a while, but was waiting for a new model to be released. Previously when I'd bought a new printer it would generally get replaced with a new model the next week, so I wanted to get in at the start of a new model. I got the i9900 last week and unpacked it, installed the eight ink tanks (yes eight different ink tanks!) and hooked it up to my PC via USB 1.1, although I had the option of USB 2.0 and Firewire. Drivers installed off the CD and I was ready to go. Well I would have been if I'd had any paper. Thankfully Canon includes a sample of their 4" x 6" photo paper so I got to try it out with those - postcard size paper looks a bit silly in a printer the size of this one though!

My first impression was that it wasn't working. It didn't appear to be making any noise and I couldn't see the paper moving. It was in fact printing, just fairly quietly and had swallowed the first sheet of paper whole and then spat it out with a crispy glossy image on it. The image appeared to have a blue cast to it, but as it dried this seemed to go away. I didn't time the output, but it didn't feel like it took very long to make a 4" x 6" print. If you're familiar with Canon's printer drivers there's nothing new here, the options appear the same as those for my previous printer - the i850.

Printing on larger paper is much more interesting. I bought a pack of Canon's 13" x 19" photo paper pro, which costs just over $1 a sheet. The printer is capable of printing full bleed on this paper, but I restricted it to 12" x 18" and printed a couple of test images. A 12" x 18" print took a few minutes to arrive and then another minute or so to fully dry. 6 megapixel images looked superb with no banding in the output or pixelisation. Colour reproduction is very good, matching well with the onscreen image. When using the vivid photo option in the drivers, the printer can over emphasize green tones in the print which looked a little unnatural to my eyes, however other people have only noticed it in one print when I've pointed it out.

I've only made four large prints so far, so I can't be certain how long the ink tanks will last before needing a replacement. I tried to gauge the amount of ink that had been drained from the tanks but it was too little for me to really measure. Replacement tanks can be had for between $10 and $15 in most cases. The printer has a USB port on the front for connecting a digital camera directly and printing from the camera - a feature I'll probably never use and I'd be surprised if many users of this printer would either, it's not aimed at the entry level digital camera user, who are the people most likely to want to print straight from the camera I think...

The quality of the printer has impressed me. Recommended if you're interested in producing large prints.

Canabalizing a MP3 player for it's Microdrive

mcreasy — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:29:00 GMT

It's been all over the web (well at least the digital media parts of it) in recent weeks about new portable MP3 players shipping with removable Hitachi Microdrives that can be used in anything with a compact flash socket - notably there's been a lot of discussion in the forums at dpreview.com. The theory is that the Creative Labs Muvo2 comes with a 4GB Microdrive that is easily removable and works in digital cameras. I was a bit of a skeptic at first about this, particularly the reliability and effect on battery life of the drive, but after doing a bit of research I decided to give it a try. I need a lot of storage for my camera - a Canon 10D, a 512MB card will normally store about 200 images, which is fine for normal purposes, but it's not enough for more than a couple of days of shooting - I ran out of space after four days in Las Vegas. In a few weeks I'll be going to China for two weeks and I plan to take a lot of photos, so the more storage space I have the better.

It's possible to buy a retail 4GB microdrive, they're around $500, whereas a Muvo2 is about $200 so it's easy to see why they are flying off the shelves. I looked around locally but couldn't find a Muvo2 and apparently although the same drive is used in the mini iPod it's got some funky firmware on it that stops it being used elsewhere. eBay came to the rescue with numerous drives being for sale at around $250, all of them coming from Muvo2 MP3 players. I got my drive this morning and put it first in my PocketPC - an iPaq 2215 - that was a mistake. It worked perfectly in the iPaq with the system reporting 3905MB of free space, but I couldn't get it out of the iPaq again. That particular model of iPaq doesn't have an eject mechanism for the CF card; you just have to pull it out which isn't as easy with the microdrive as it is with regular flash cards - regular cards have a small lip at the end so there is something to grip, the microdrive doesn't so I couldn't get hold of it. Thankfully my office mate had a pair of tweezers which I used to get a good enough grip on it to get it out of the iPaq. Next I tried it in my 10D. I switched it on and the display flashed "Error CF", so I formatted the card in the camera and saw "Error 99" instead. That wasn't good. I took the card out and put it back in again. Switched the camera back on and it worked. The display showed that I had 999 shots left - it can only show three digits, so it can display that there's probably space for 1600 photos on the card. I took a few shots and the camera coped well with buffering and writing to the card. It's not as fast as flash memory, but with the camera buffering before writing to the card, it shouldn't be a problem. I'd heard that using a PC to format the card with 32K cluster sizes makes the card faster in the Canon 10D so I gave that a try. The way to specify cluster size is to use the Disk Management part of Computer Management - right click on My Computer and choose Manage, then in Computer Management select Disk Management, right click on the drive and select Format. I used the FAT32 filesystem with 32K cluster sizes and put it back in the camera - it still worked. I can't tell if it's any faster yet as I haven't given it a full workout to see how it performs.

I'll shoot a load of photos this weekend to see what the battery life is like with the card and if there are any issues with using it, but so far it looks good!

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