EFGlass.com - Know Canon Your Glass, See What It Can Do.

I could spend all weekend reading about camera equipment, but I always found most of the lens listing sites out there a little lacking in areas, so I spent the past three days putting together this initial version of EFGlass.com. It's not that complex right now, but believe me, I have plenty planned for future releases.

As it is, you can see Canon's full lens line-up with some basic information about each lens, a link back to its specifications page on Canon's website, a link to Amazon so you can check its current price, and one to a Flickr group pool, where you can see what people are using shooting with each it.

I'll post major site updates to this blog, and welcome any suggestions or comments - please email me, or call and leave me a voice message using the widget on the right side of this page.

"Just My Luck" - Lensbaby Video With Plastic Optic on Canon 5D Mark II

(View on Flickr in high res)

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I have been meaning to spend more time tinkering with my Canon 5D Mark II's video capabilities. When my car wouldn't start in the bitter cold* this morning, I decided to take the opportunity to shoot some clips with my new Lensbaby Composer and plastic optic lens system.

First, if it's not yet obvious, I'm no video-processing guru. In fact, this short clip took exactly three times as long as it should have to put together - about two and a half hours in all. It's the most complex video work I've done with iMovie 09, and I'm just now starting to see why advanced users complain about its lack of features and move to Final Cut Studio. You can probably accomplish most of what you need with iMovie, but you may have to jump through hoops to do it. Luckily, it's very easy and powerful for general purposes.

This was shot with a single camera from three different shots:
1. stationary shot with the camera on the seat
2. dashboard shot of the flashing lights
3. death scene with the sun flares

The stationary shot was the longest, so I detached its audio and used it throughout the whole video. I tinkered with iMovie's precision editor to achieve realistic transitions between the different clips. You can nudge around +/- 0.1 second in either direction, and if you're as neurotic as I am, you end up spending quite a good bit of time nudging.

I must say that I'm now hooked on the Lensbaby Composer. Its optics really give you creative freedom. A significant portion of a normal lens' cost goes into its ability to reduce flare. Sometimes, like in the death scene here, flare is beautiful, and boy can you achieve it with the Lensbaby plastic optic! For the dashboard scene, I wanted to draw attention to the flashing lights, so I bent the lens to keep the lower right corner of the video mostly in focus while blurring the rest to hell.

I imagine I'll be flooding my Flickr stream with a tad too many Lensbaby shots over the next few months...


* I consider 21 degrees Fahrenheit to be bitter cold... your milage may vary...

       

Canon Picture Styles

Like it or not, this image effectively came straight out of my camera, using a custom picture style.

I shoot entirely in RAW mode, so I never bothered to look into these JPG presets. However, after seeing how far you could push these presets in-camera in this post at Canon 5D Tips, I thought I'd try messing with Canon's Picture Style Editor a bit to see what I could come up with.

The author of the 5D Tips blog post wasn't kidding - the software is very difficult to use. I have no idea what I did to achieve the above image, but it's cool enough that I'm going to keep tinkering to see what else I can come up with. Adobe Lightroom can't use these picture styles, so I had to export my JPG in Canon's DPP. And, since I'd rather swallow a handful of white-hot thumbtacks than use DPP, I think I'll just switch to RAW+JPG for the times when I'm tinkering with picture styles for crazy effects like the one above.

The Canon 40D and 5D Mark II only allow 3 custom picture styles, so I'm going to take only my favorite presets with me. I can always resort to DPP in post-processing, so it's not critical that I have my picture styles with me, but it'll be cool to see how well the effects work with the shots in-camera. Also, I'm no wizard with video processing, so it'll be a nice shortcut to apply these effects to video in-camera as well.

Overall, if you shoot RAW, nothing much is gained here but a little fun while shooting.

Drobo BeyondRAID Enclosures - Making Hard Drive Death Less Painful

Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array

My Canon 40D turned me into a digital pack rat with its 10 megapixel RAW files, slowly filling up my 500GB hard drive up over the course of a year and a half. Every few weeks, I'd burn my recent photos on two sets of DVD-Rs, put them in different boxes, and rest assured that my data was reasonably safe. It was a problem, but a manageable one.

That backup strategy wasn't ready for my upgrade to a Canon 5D Mark ii a few months ago. I now have 21 megapixel RAW files that weigh in around 27MB each, and 1080P video at 300MB per minute. Not only that, but the camera can shoot in damned-near darkness, so I'm shooting in locations that were previously inaccessible. Most outings with the camera would end in a filled 16GB CF card. It didn't take too long to find myself 100 DVDs behind in my backup routine.

In comes Drobo - a multiple unit hard drive enclosure all of the benefits of traditional RAID, but without the rigidity. The Drobo houses up to four SATA drives, spreading your data across them to protect against any one of them from failing. It doesn't care if your drives are the same size or vendor, and, you can replace drives at any time with one of equal or bigger size. You can also start with two drives, and work your way up to four, if you like. The biggest drive in the cluster is used for redundancy, so if you had four 500GB drives, your total usable disk space is about 1.5GB.

Unlike RAID, the unit is data-aware, continually checking for errors. If any are detected, the green light will flash yellow next to the affected drive. If the drive is on the verge of dying, the light turns red. At this point, you can remove and replace the failing drive without turning it off, and while still using it, if you like. The Drobo takes care of assimilating the new drive into the cluster, spreading the data across it to protect from any future drive failure, completely transparent to your machine.

I still plan on continuing to burn my data to DVD-R, but have become a little more lax since buying the Drobo. To safeguard against accidental deletions, complete hardware failure, or theft, I signed up to BackBlaze.com unlimited data offsite backup. For $50/year, Backblaze's software automatically encrypts and uploads all of my data to their servers, even keeping a couple of weeks of incremental backups so that I can rollback some data to a few days ago, if needed.

I now sleep just a tad better at night.

While you're at it, I recommend you get started with two of these 1.5TB Seagate drives. If you have an extra 500GB drive laying around the house, throw it in the mix as well - it can't hurt, you can upgrade it later.

Phillies' Clay Condrey - Action Pitching Sequence

I shot this at a Phillies game with my Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS back on May 8, 2009. This was a composite of 6 shots of 20 taken in high speed mode SRAW, then stitched together in Photoshop.

For reference, here's how far back we were sitting:


With the 1.6X crop factor of the Canon 40D and 200mm, you get in pretty close to the action.

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Color Calibration System

I just received the new X-Rite ColorChecker Passport color calibration and white balance system after growing weary of eyeballing my photos' white balance for some time now.

I recently calibrated my monitor with the Pantone huey MEU101 monitor calibrator, but still spent too much time trying to find the white balance and tint to give accurate and pleasing skin tones.

So, I broke down and ordered the ColorChecker Passport. It's $100, which is a lot, and since I've only spent a couple of hours with it, I'm not yet aware of all of the ways I can use it. But, in this two hours, I was able to find out some amazing stuff... Like... My color thus far... is awful.

The first thing I did with the ColorChecker was to take it outside and shoot it at arms' length:

This is the shot exactly as it came out of my 5d Mark II and 35mm f/1.4L, with no modifications.

I then adjusted the white balance by keying off of the neutral landscape grey square, which gave me this:

This is as far as I thought I'd have to go to get true colors. I figured, get the white balance, and use the rest of the color squares to help eyeball up my greens, blues, etc. Well, this is just the beginning. This is where I realized how little I knew about color management.

Apparently every copy of a camera and lens - and thus, combination - have different color signatures. The software can analyze a test shot containing the ColorChecker Passport, locate it within the frame, then determine the camera's response to the known colors within that environment. Doing this couldn't be easier. From Adobe Lightroom, you just export your test image through their exporter, then give the profile a name such as "Outdoors, 35mm f/1.4L before sunset". After the export is complete, you restart Lightroom, and the color profile is available for you to use for the rest of that photo shoot. The color profiles are available for use in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

The results were less than subtle:


Open the three test images in separate browser tabs and flip through them. You'll notice a purplish hue in my original photo, corrected in the white balanced one. The difference between the second and third shots is mainly in the blues, purples, and greens - color responses you can't correct for with standard white balance cards.


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How We Roll

(View my studio site)

We might have had a little too much fun tonight.

Strobist Info:
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* Key: Alien Bees B800 studio strobe shot into Alien Bees large foldable softbox with grid, camera right.
* Fill: Nikon SB-28 speedlight shot into Westcott 43" Shoot-Through Umbrella, camera left, 1 to 1.5 stops below key, triggered by Pocket Wizard wireless flash trigger.
* Background lighting: Canon 430EX triggered by Pocket wizard, Nikon SB-26 triggered by built-in optical trigger, both at about 1.5 stops below key, pointed into white back. I used the velcro compartment separators from my camera bag as gobos on the two background flashes

Background: Savage 107" Super White Seamless Background Paper

Floor: Two sheets of white tile board, the front one overlapping the back one, which overlaps the paper.