Lets get serious!

I love beautiful locations,

I love being artistic,

I love being creative,

I love meeting interesting people,

I love sharing my passions,

I love setting up the lighting gear,

I love heading out shooting with my wife,

I love seeing people open up to the camera,

I love making the mundane seem special,

I love taking pictures of my son,

I love an opportunity to make my dreams a reality,

I love to take a risk and try to fly,

I'd love to be a photographer.

Time to make something special happen.

Review: Canon 100-400mm L Lens

The jokes kept coming all trip. Some said I was compensating for something. Some asked if I had NASA clearance to use it. All I know is, of all the lenses I could have had in my bag that trip, I'm really glad I had this one.
So, just recently I had an opportunity to take a trip to Kauai. Well, it was less a trip and more a four day business meeting with pina colada's but that's a different story. Either way, I knew, being the garden island, that there was going to be plenty of opportunities to photograph some beautiful things. It seemed to me to be the ideal situation to try out a new lens. Where else to try out a new lens then in a location with almost limitless subjects. After much himming and hawing, I decided to rent the Canon 100-400mm from the folks over at Borrow Lenses.com. It probably wasn't the most practical of lenses to choose but it fit a niche that was missing from my camera bag, the super telephoto. The wides and mid ranges were covered with my 10-22mm EFS and 28-135mm. And thanks to a co-worker, the 70-200mm 4.0 covered the telephoto range.
So, before I go any further, I want to preface the rest of the review with the fact that I am not a technical specialist when it comes to lenses and lens technology. This review is based strictly on my experiences and impressions of the lens with the short amount of time that I had it. Now that that is out of the way, back to the review.
The first thing I noticed about the lens, before I even had a chance to get it on the camera body was it's weight. Sure, the reviews all tell you it weights in at about 3lbs but it is difficult to really understand what that will do to the camera's balance until it's on there and you're swinging it around. And it's inclusion in my camera bag introduced a significant amount of strain on my shoulders and back, even with a good sturdy camera backpack.
The second thing that through me for a bit of a loop was the push-pull zoom system. Now, given that I'm fairly new to the world of photography, all the lenses that I have experience with have been the rotational zoom type. To move from that to the push pull system took some getting used to. I actually found that I would leave the tension ring fairly loose while shooting, as the issue of having the lens slide around was failry irrelevant because I was almost always shooting on the horizontal.
Then I looked through the lens and wow. The range of zooms this lens can access is spectactular. At the shortest lenght, it allows you just enough room to get portraits at 20-30 feet away. But, at it's longest lenght, you could fill the frame with the persons eye at the same range, or pick off license plates off cars 1/4 mile away, or pick out individual craters on the moon. (No joke)
The range of shots this lens could capture was pretty spectacular; from landscape, to sunrise, to portrait, to wildlife. This was the go-to lens for the trip when I wanted to capture something up close. And though the look of a canon L series lenses is usually pretty distinct and attention grabbing, I was able to capture some fairly candid shots just by the virtue of being able to zoom.
Now, the challenge of having all that zoom range focusing it. The lens actually does a pretty good job at focusing, as long as it stays with the current focal area. The problems start happening when the lens is unable to focus within it's current focal area and it has to begin scanning. A full sweep from one end of the lens' focal area to the other can take approximately 1-2 seconds. I only had this occur to me a few times though, mostly in those situations where there was either too little light or I was not able to focus the camera on a subject against a flat background like the sky. Otherwise, the focus was usually fast and accurate, even when shooting elusive subjects like whales.
Below are a coupe shots grabbed from the trip. Each shows the range of shoots that can be achieved with this lens.

This shot was taken pretty much from the hip. I was able to swing around a steady myself just as this kid pulled the fish up. No other lens in my bag would have allowed me to capture a shot like this.

The taro fields, shot from a bluff above. The colors and contrast that are produced when using an L series lens are amazing.

A humpback's tail captured from maybe a quarter mile away. One thing that amazed me about this picture was even though the whale was so far way, details like the barnacles on it's tail are still clear and crisp.

In Focus: Winter Cemetery

There's something very eerie about visiting a cemetery. Looking at a collection of all those that have lived and died before you is a fair stark reminder of your own mortality. On the other hand though, it is interesting to think about lives of those who lived before, the lives they lived and the history they made. Either way, cemeteries tend to be a place I stray away from. One very foggy morning, my wife decided to drag me out for a shoot at one of her favorite cemeteries. It ended up being a perfect time to visit as the fog really added to the atmosphere of the location. Enjoy.

In Focus: Seattle's Space Needle

For something that was essentially built as a tourist attraction, the Seattle Space Needle has become the iconic structure that defines the Seattle skyline. In fact, I would go as far to say that the Space Needle defines Seattle, at least in the minds of those people that don't live there. It's what people visualize when they think of Seattle in the same way the Golden Gate Bridge iconicly represents San Francisco. Either way, I had an opportunity to visit the Space Needle on the way back from Canadian Thanksgiving. Other than being kind of expensive, I quite enjoyed the trip up the needle and it made for some great photo opportunities.


The view from the top of the needle looking South.


A combination panorama and collage from the bottom of the Space Needle.

New Canon 50D - The DSLR that thinks it's a point and shoot

In what seems to me to be a surprising move, Canon today announced the newest addition to their pro-sumer line of cameras, the 50D. Now, I'm not really sure how I feel about this. Less then a year after the release of the 40D, Canon is releasing a camera that essentially competes with the 40D. Especially with so much anticipation for the 5D Mark II, it seems like a strange choice for them to up a new camera into this market space. They are essentially giving those individuals that were waiting for the new 5D an upgrade path that is significantly less expensive. Either way, the press release hinted at many new features and enhancements over it's predecessor. Some of them sounded very exciting and some of the seem less then promising.

Things that sound cool:

• 15.1 Mega Pixel - This is a huge update, especially considering the minimal jumps from the 20D to the 40D.
• DIGIC IV - New image processor is always a plus.
• Higher ISO - Up to 12800 ISO which levels the playing field a little with comparison to Nikon and the D300
• Upgraded LCD screen - 920,000 dot/VGA screen means even better resolution for preview and live view. This is especially interesting for me seeing I've always been a bit frustrated with the resolution of the preview screen.
• RAW in creative modes - Though not my style, I like to see that RAW is an option for those people that are still out in the creative modes.
• Improved Live View - Live View was a nifty idea but I never really used it mostly because AF was not very smoothly integrated. With the new Live View features, I'm interested to see if they made AF much easier.
  

Things that sound scary:

• Illumination Correction - Apparently this feature automatically evens the brightness across image a la a gradient filter. For JPEGs, these changes are written directly to the file. For RAW files, these changes corrected in post-production in RAW with DPP. What scares me is, personally, I wouldn't want the camera deciding where it thinks the line between light and dark is. Adjustments over the entire frame I can live with because you can predict and adjust for what the camera will do. Adjustments across only part of the frame rely heavily on the decisions made by the internal processor on the camera.
• 15.1 Mega Pixel - Shoving more pixels on the same sized sensor sounds like a recipe for noisy pictures.
• Auto Lighting Optimizer - Sounds a bit like they are photoshopping for you, which, for the same reason Illumination Correction scares me, scares me.
  
• Creative Full Auto settings - An interesting idea but this again feels like auto photoshopping.
  
• Live View face detection - This feature seems like it doesn't fit in a DSLR. I just can't imagine people holding their huge DSLR out in front of their face like it is a little point and shoot. It really does feel like Canon is trying to make Live View standard way to compose shoots with a digital camera but I just don't see that being feasible with a 2 lbs DSLR that is hopefully strapped to your neck.
• sRAW1 & sRAW2 - I never understood why someone would want to shoot in sRAW. It didn't make any sense to me then and it I don't understand why they would add one more level of sRAW.
  
• HDMI Output - This seems to be another feature that has been imported from the point and shoot line that really doesn't fit. To me, when I want to show off my pictures to others, I'm not going to be tethering my camera to the TV and showing them their. For quick preview with your family, this might be useful, but in the market that a usual DSLR is in, this doesn't seem necesary.
  

The new 50D really seems to me like an attempt to release a camera that appeals to amateur photographers that don't know much about DSLRs and advanced photography but want to get into that space. Also seems more like an attempt to compete with Nikon rather than releasing a camera that really does meet the needs of its customers. Either way, I'll be interested to see how this new offering shakes out. If anything, the new upgrades to the pro-sumer level cameras are a good sign of what will be coming with the new 5D.

Original Press Release
DP preview of the 50D

How about a drive?

Marin is a beautiful place to live. Sometimes I worry that living in a place that is so eutopia-esque will eventually make me soft (a-la that Baz Luhrmann song) but as good as things are, there are still things to keep me on edge. One of them is highway 1. Few things are more fun then attacking the curves of highway 1. Guard rails are usually optional and with views like this, it's often tough to keep your eyes on the road. Miss this turn and it's a good 300 feet down to the ocean. ^_^

Fun with fireworks and long exposures

Few things are more 4th of July then sparklers. They bring the kid out in almost anyone. The cool thing about growing up though is you get all sorts of new and expensive toys that can help making things much cooler. Until we picked up our first DSLR, I would have never thought about playing with the shutter speed on fireworks. The big advantage of having a camera with all this functionality is you have some many possiblities to capture interesting photographs. The photos below represent only two of the 60+ sparklers that we went through that night along with several more adult fireworks. First is my attempt at making a hostess cupcake swirl.
Of course, I had to be up-staged by my sister-in-law. A truly awesome rendition of a hostess cupcake.
Unfortunately, the booth that sold the fireworks were closed the day after the 4th so we couldn't try this again but it was fun while it lasted.

On the technical side, all shoots were done under shutter priority (Tv) at a shutter speed ranging from 4" to 15". ISO was up at 1600 to capture as much light as possible.