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Auckland Anniversary Fireworks

February 1, 2010 #

Auckland just celebrated its birthday with a long weekend, a huge regatta, various and assorted festivals, and—of course—fireworks.

As always when shooting fireworks, it’s good to have a sturdy tripod, and to sort out your camera settings before the show starts. I usually go with ISO 100, f/8 and 2-4 second exposures. But given the unpredictable nature of the subject, luck helps a great deal too: This shot started out in the reject pile as a “miss”, but it’s growing on me.

The fireworks themselves were some of the most impressive I’ve seen. They were big, bold, and went on for a good quarter of an hour over the Waitemata Harbour.

The crowds on Princes Wharf were duly impressed, and burst into spontaneous applause at the end of the show.

20D to 7D

November 15, 2009 #

I’ve had my Canon EOS 20D for five years. I’ve shot over 50,000 frames with it, lugged it around several continents, and subjected it to endless abuse: It’s been splashed with freezing meltwater on glaciers in New Zealand, covered in mud on remote tracks in Western Samoa, and fogged up inside and out in the syrupy humidity of southern Vietnam. It has been one of my most dependable gadgets, and it has captured many of my favorite images over the years.

But despite its tank-like build and indisputable utility, the 20D is sometimes infuriating to use. The viewfinder is small and crops out a significant chunk of the image. The autofocus system has poor tracking of moving subjects and is very slow in the dark. Images turn into a soup of red and green noise at high ISO settings. The noisy shutter release never fails to attract unwanted attention from human and animal subjects. And the camera is just a little too small to hold comfortably. So when Canon launched the EOS 7D in early October, it was finally time for an upgrade.

Detailed reviews of the 7D are available from all the usual suspects. If you’re interested in the gory details, check out the write-up over at the Digital Photography Review. They dive into, measure and rate just about every aspect of the camera. And like most reviewers, they wax lyrical about the big viewfinder, the new AF system, the movie mode and all the other headline features.

Surprisingly, though, there is very little mention of what it’s like to use the 7D in practice. I haven’t seen anyone discussing the little delights and annoyances that you discover when you start using the new camera in the field. So below, I have summarized some of my observations, from the perspective of someone upgrading from the 20D.

Starting with the highlights:

The AF system does a great job of tracking moving subjects. It’ll happily lock onto a small target—such as a bird in flight—against a cluttered background, despite erratic camera movement. This is a far cry from the 20D and even the 5D Mark II, both of which are essentially useless for anything that moves. In addition, while tracking a subject with AI Servo mode, the viewfinder is constantly updated to show the currently selected focus points. Again, this is a huge improvement over Canon’s older AF systems, where there was nothing at all to indicate that the AI Servo was even operating.
Every time you depress the shutter button, the AF system selects another set of focus points. I actually don’t know if this is by design or by chance, but it works great in practice. If you’re not happy with the first set of points selected, just let go of the shutter button and hit it again. This is usually far quicker than manually selecting a focus point, or locking focus and recomposing the shot.
The CF card door locks much more securely into place than it did on the 20D and friends. So if you pull the camera out of your bag by the grip, the door doesn’t have the same tendency to flip open. This used to be a constant frustration for me, so I’m very happy that Canon finally sorted it out.
In difficult lighting conditions, the 7D errs on the side of a slight overexposure. This is great news for those of us who are used to the chronic underexposures of the 20D. And assuming you are shooting RAW, the higher exposure generally means more information to extract in post-processing.
For those of us with large hands, the 7D has fantastic ergonomics. Squeezing the grip feels like squeezing a slab of steel. There’s absolutely no give, and not so much as a creak. The moulded grip is natural and secure, and the textured surface has just the right amount of friction. With the 20D, I would always wind the neck strap around my hand while carrying the camera. But with the 7D, I haven’t even attached the strap, despite the extra weight. Incidentally, because the 7D is so heavy, it is also almost perfectly balanced with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens attached.

But I’m not thrilled about every change that Canon made. Here are some of my pet peeves with the 7D:

I think I speak for most potential customers when I say that I would happily trade the flash for a full frame sensor. I shot 50,000 frames with my 20D, and I used the built-in flash for literally about 10 of those. In fact, when I tried to pop up the flash on the 20D a few weeks ago, I discovered that it had rusted shut.
Canon has implemented various technologies to keep the sensor clear of dust, and it works great. But instead, the viewfinder is an absolute dust magnet. Every time you change lenses, new bits of dust and debris attach themselves to the underside of the prism. This is compounded by the fact that it’s very hard to reach inside to clean this area. I find viewfinder dust spots very distracting, but it looks like they will be a fact of life with the 7D.
Switching between AF modes is awkward. You have to first press the AF point selection button, then the Multi-function button until your desired AF mode is selected. And some AF modes are only available through Custom Functions, which means you have to make a roundtrip to the menu. If you’re in a hurry, you have already missed the shot.
When reviewing images, you can’t easily turn on or off the flashing indication for blown highlights. Unlike with the 20D, this operation now requires a roundtrip to the menu. While I like the blown highlight indication in most circumstances, there are times when I intentionally overexpose an image—and when I do, the flashing is just a distraction.
Ok, this one is covered in other reviews, but it’s so stupid that it needs special mention: The Direct Print button. There’s a dedicated button on the back of the camera to print an image directly to a compatible Canon printer. And because that feature is unlikely to ever be used by anyone in the 7D’s target market, the button now has a secondary function, which is to switch from RAW or JPEG shooting to RAW+JPEG. This is ridiculous and annoying: Whenever you accidentally hit this button, your shooting settings are changed, with no immediate indication of what just happened.

I have now used the new camera for six weeks. And as you can probably tell, the little positive surprises far outweigh the annoyances. Overall, the 7D is an absolute joy to use—and it’s been years since I had this much fun taking photos.

US East Coast

October 24, 2009 #

I’m back from the US, and I’ve just posted some photos from the trip over in the Photography section. Keep in mind that you can click the “View Slideshow” link on the gallery page for larger versions of all images.

Above, foam vortices in the Niagara River, just below Niagara Falls. Or is it an image of star formation in some dynamic nebula, millions of light years away?

Eastern Seaboard

September 4, 2009 #

I’ll be traveling in the northeastern US until early October. As always, photos will be posted and emails answered on my return.

Stray Dog

August 19, 2009 #

Stray dogs are a common sight in most Argentine cities. And while many of them look pretty ragged, you can often tell that there’s a beautiful animal under all that tousled fur. The one on the right was our favorite. And the heartbreaking thing is that she totally knew it: She followed us around for a long time, clearly doing everything in her power to get herself adopted.

The photo was shot in central Salta, which is a lovely little city in northwestern Argentina. I fired off a few quick frames at knee level, to capture a dog’s eye perspective of the world. Because the image is taken at point blank range, with a wide open aperture, almost everything is out of focus. But her eye, with that deep gash—maybe from a fight with another dog—is tack sharp, and becomes the focal point of the image.

I’m not sure if it’s the injury that gets me, or her expression of guarded hope, or maybe just the sense of isolation from the blurry locals in the background. But this is one of my favorite images from Argentina.

Funnily enough, as this dog was following us around, she appears in quite a few other photos. In this slightly more cheerful image, she is hovering patiently while I’m trying to find a good angle on an inside-out magazine stand.