Decided on new camera body

It was not a very tough decision to replace the current digital camera, but it has served me well. The tough decision was if I should keep the Rebel as a digital backup body or not. Finally, after a few days of thinking about it I have put the entire kit I orderd originally up for auction:

Auction Link: *SOLD*

Once the current system is sold and a new one is ordered, I'll post an initial review of it and then a more comprehensive set of articles once the racing season gets back underway and I have a chance to really put it though it's paces.

Digital Rebel (300D) – 9 month review

The Canon Digital Rebel (300D) is my first digital SLR, a switch I made mid-season last year after becoming tired of scanning in transparencies, cleaning up the inevitable dust specs and finally re-sizing for upload to the website (of course there is still some post-prod work that needs to be done but it cut the amount of time required to publish images by at least 80%)!

After shooting tens of thousands of images with the Digital Rebel (with both consumer and professional Canon glass) I have some thoughts about the Rebel itself that others might find of use. This might sound like a rant but I really do like the camera and enjoy using it but unfortunately it is simply not a unit capable of functioning as the primary body for professional work.

FPS and frame buffer.
This has been my biggest gripe so far. At 2.5 fps the speed is OK but the 4 frame buffer is totally inadequate for photographing the high-speed action of motorsports events (however, the camera is very capable for shooting portrait and most wildlife subjects).

Quite often while on assignment I found myself cursing the 4 frame buffer as action continued but the camera was unable to capture because the buffer was full. Some of this is the result of not having enough 66x and 80x memory cards, but even with the fastest cards currently on the market it does not take long for the 4 frame buffer to become a major hindrance to getting ‘the shot’.

There are a number of excellent firmware hacks for the Rebel that address a number of the issues but frame buffer size is one that so far is unaddressable without upgrading to a better and more expensive body.

Continuous Focus
Another challenge I am facing is the camera’s inability to maintain focus on subjects approaching or departing at high speeds. Even at a relatively slow 2.5 frames-per-second (FPS) the focus system will only keep 1 or maybe 2 of the 4 buffered frames in focus. I understand that there are some firmware hacks that can help out with this. A long-time software engineer I’ve executed plenty of code hacks over the years but I was simply not ready to apply these hacks to my working camera body in case something went wrong. Sometimes hacks can break an otherwise well working product. Having seeing approximately 9 hack revisions in the time I’ve owned my camera my confidence in these hacks was non-existent so I never tried one to address this issue with the camera. So this might not be a big deal to anyone who has applied the hack.

Image Sensor Reflection
This was a baffling issue for quite some time until I’d read an article about digital camera sensor light reflection. Something that of course film is not suseptiable to (or at least I’d never seen it before). It first manifested itself while shooting pictures of street-bikes on the local mountains.
As the headlights would traverse the center of the sensor light would be reflected off the sensor, into the lens and them back to the sensor leaving green ghost images of the headlamps (or any exceptionally bring light source).

At first I thought it was my consumer-grade zoom lens and possibly my UV filter. I started doing some tests with and without the UV filter and found that it had no effect. I then swapped my consumer lens (75-300mm USM II) with one of my L glass zooms (70-200 f2.8L) and viola.. I had the same problem! I was quite perplexed until I read about others having similar issues and tracing this back to reflections.

This is NOT an issue unique to the digital rebel by any means. To date I have not kept up on sensor advancements and any changes manufactures might be making to the sensor’s surfaces to help combat this. Perhaps something as simple as a polarizing layer/coating might solve this but then it would likely alter the sensors ability to record the photons and could really be an issue if the end-user installs a polarizing filter on the front of the lens, it could potentially render the image black! How they plan to solve this problem, if they can practically solve this problem will be something anyone going from film to digital should consider.

Card Write Speed
How fast can this camera write to the CF card installed? I have no clue and the last time I checked neither did anyone else for that matter. After tying some higher speed cards (66x and 80x) there seemed to not be much performance benefit above the 20x and 40x cards I was already using. This is a subjective evaluation at best since I’ve never tried to perform and empirical testing but as they say in the marketing world ‘perception is reality’ and in this case my perception is that there is a write-speed bottleneck in the camera (hardware or firmware?) that is an impediment to shooting (especially when combined with the small buffer). If anyone knows for sure what the max write speed of the Digital Rebel is I’d love to hear about it!

Focus – auto and manual
Again, this could be user error (as is possible with my Continuous Focus issue) but either way.. it’s hot helping me out much. The Rebel has a 7 spot focus system. And for the most part it’s pretty smart about picking the right spot to focus upon, and with the ability to manually select which of the 7 spots to force focus upon composition is not a big issue. However the spots are not all in the most convenient spots for me.

The other big issue I am having with the camera is when using it in manual focus mode (something I’ve had to do since the death of the USM motor on my 70-200L lens – currently at Canon for repair) I cannot tell when I have the image as sharp as I feel it should be and the hot-spot focus spots do not seem to light up on the spots that ‘look’ the most in focus to me. My vision being recently tested at better than 20-20 I don’t suspect it’s my eyes at this point. If the viewfinder had an older more traditional prism focus circle in the middle I’d feel A LOT more comfortable using the manual-focus modes. My older all-manual Canon bodies had replaceable focus planes but I’ve not seen anything like this for the Rebel or the other Canon Digital SLR’s in my companies current budget. The new D1 Mark II’s might have this feature but at $8,000 for the body.. I’m not planning on picking one up any time soon.

Startup speed
The camera is pretty good at waking up after an inactivity powerdown but not good enough for my needs. At nearly 2 seconds… the moment (shot) can be long lost by the time the camera wakes up and starts to smell the roses. This has happened to me more times than I care to recall. One can easily attribute this again to user error. I’ll admit that it’s very well could be 100% my issue with not using the camera ‘correctly’ but honestly, I really don’t care.

I have my shooting and use style that I developed over years of using film cameras that never had this startup issue and re-training myself to think 2-seconds ahead so I can have a camera ready for action is just not likely to happen. It would seem that I am not the only one that finds this an issue since the one of the new Canon D20’s features I the 0.2 second wakeup time that Canon touts in it’s current marketing literature for the camera.

Seeing the greener grass
To a certain extent, ignorance is bliss and I’ll freely admit that I was squarely in this category until I tried out some higher-end Canon hardware.

While shooting an event about 1 month back I was treated by another photographer with the use of his D20 body for a few laps of the event.

The fast wakeup, the 5 fps shooting speed and that seemingly limitless (25 at full-resolution low-compression JPEG) frame buffer forever spoiled me. It was at this point that I became very sensitive to the limitations of my current equipment and started to think back about previous events. Looking back I realized that in many instances I was silently cursing the camera, and myself for running out of frame buffer right when the action was getting great.

Again, a non-issue with my film cameras as I was very adept at swapping film cans out while the action was on the other side of the circuit, but I must admit I sure don’t miss the hundreds of dollars I’d have to spend on film to keep shooting all the frames I wanted as fast as I wanted.

What I liked about the Rebel
There are a lot of things I like about the rebel. One of the most notable is the how much more I can invest in equipment now that I’m not spending $15 per roll on film! Digital is a wonderful thing! The size of the sensor on the Rebel is not as large as I’d like but it’s still capable of producing with a little work 11x14 prints nice enough for framing.

Another aspect of the Rebel that I really liked are it’s very efficient use of the rechargeable batteries! I could shoot for hours on end on one charge. Plus if I left the camera one it would power itself down saving the battery. Such was not the case with my old Canon A-1 which would burn up a $9.00 lithium battery in a couple of days if I forgot to turn it off (and that happened more often than I care to admit). Aftermarket batteries for the camera are easy enough to find and at a reasonable price online so with a few extras I could shoot all weekend long and not need to find an A/C outlet to recharge them.

It’s also very light weight compared again to my A-1 with it’s power-winder and fleet of batteries required to power it. When hiking up and down the hills of race tracks like Laguna Seca, every lb. starts to count! It was a welcome relief.

Night shooting was nearly noise free. The Digic processor did an excellent job of managing JPEG compression noise when shooting at night. The blacks were very black. Previous digital cameras I’ve had and even some scanners turned true black into a noisy patch of pixels rendering the image useless. Other than the issue I mentioned above about sensor reflection, night shooting was quite impressive.

In conclusion, the Digital Rebel is a great entry level camera but unfortunately it was not a viable replacement for my A-1 film bodies and it’s time to try another of Canon’s excellent EOS bodies.

What should I try next…..

Business Travel (code SSSS)

Thrusday, Feb 17 10:30pm - SFO Terminal 3

It’s been one very interesting day. I am writing this from the United terminal at SFO, 10:35pm awaiting my flight (delayed of course) back to Seattle after a business trip that I cut short.

Originally scheduled to fly in Thursday Feb. 17 for meetings on what is basically my client’s largest and most important product, to plan for the next major release. Some of the people I was scheduled to meet are part of the companies executive staff (including a couple of V.P.’s). By some oversight on the part of the client they had neglected to contact me within before my departure to let me know that the plans had changed. Basically, they paid for me to warm a seat on someone’s airplane for a few hours, hang out at their office (although I feel I provided some critical feedback to one of the engineers on how to solve a problem that had been plaguing them for some time – so not all was a waste as far as the customer is concerned).

For me however, it was a huge inconvenience to leave my family on 5 days notice, get up at 3:00am to make the 6:00am flight out of SeaTac so I could be at the customers San Francisco offices on time ready to work.

After calling the people who scheduled the meetings and requested me to travel to SFO I found out that they had simply neglected to contact me and let me know I did not have to go. Thanks. J

All was not lost. I was able to cancel my hotel and switch my flight to this evening. Or at least that’s what Expedia Corporate Travel (whom I plan to never use again) told me several times on the phone as I tried to adjust my plans.

Following the cancellation of the hotel and informing the client that I would be returning to my home office I find that the seats Expedia said were available on the return flights were in fact not only unavailable but the flights were all so over-sold I would not be allowed to purchase a standby ticket. They were also unable to help me book fare on any other than the original airline. Thus my quest for a return flight began.

Working from A to Z I visited every ticket counter in the airport (I tried to get good flight info on the in house phone but it was more than worthless). After much walking and just about giving up I found a late fright on United Airlines that would get me into SeaTac around 1:00am (and home around 2:30am). Bingo! I would not have to sleep in the airport!

So I bought my one-way ticket for $215.00 and headed for the security gate. That’s where the fun began. I travel a lot and I have the security screening thing down to a system that gets me through fast and clean. I always fly Alaskan Airlines where I have my own corporate account, frequent flyer plans, the whole nine yards. They treat me well.

Unfortunately United Airlines does not know me from Adam. All they know is that I’m a male, with no checked bags on a one-way ticket. Well, I had the security officer my boarding pass as I always do, expecting to be directed to the nearest lane. No such luck.

The screener checking ID’s and passes suddenly yells across the very crowded security area to set up a ‘box’ and they quickly herd me into a little roped off section where I stand watching many people filter though the checkpoints.

They shut down the left most lane completely, shooed all the other passengers though and then put away the gray personal belongings bins and got out the brown ones (I quickly discovered that those singled out for special screening MUST use the brown bins, interesting) and then blockaded the area so they could process me all by my self with my own basically private screening lane.

Everything was checked for bomb residue with the swabs. This took some time as I had to very full carryon bags. Following this and my safely passing the initial metal screening I was sent to ‘The Chair’s where my feet and legs where carefully scanned. My bags were brought before me (about 4’ away) and while I stood with my arms out (being scanned) I got to observer them go thought EVERYTHING in my bags. Not that I had anything criminal or embarrassing, but.. it was not exactly what I wanted to have done since I pack those things carefully to get them down to the required size.

It only delayed me about 5 min. more than my normal security screening experience. They were very polite, I was very polite and when it was all over I got a good tip on where to eat in the terminal (and it was a good tip at that).

This is when I discovered, I think, why I was singled out for such extraordinary screening (it took a while to put the bits together including some comments that the security screener made at the time that did not make sense but now make complete sense).

Basically, United Airlines flagged my boarding pass for what I call Super Secret Security Screening (or SSSS). They reason I think this is the way the ID checker grabbed my pass and circled the letters ‘SSSS’ that were on my boarding pass (something I’ve not seen on any of my passes before).

Following my screening the last screener lined out the ‘SSSS’, and had his supervisor sign off on it, then handed it back, saying ‘Now the Airline will know you have been properly screened’. Huh? OH! Right.. the airline flagged me for the screening when I bought the ticket, not the security team, they were just following the instructions of the airline to protect their property and passengers from a criminal sociopath (males buying one-way tickets with no checked baggage).

It was an unusual need, having to buy a one-way ticket and on a trip originally planned for 2 days there was no need for checked bags. A simple combination of conditions put me in the category of individuals needing a good looking over. And I guess I cannot blame them.

To add just a tiny bit of irony to the story, the flight that I am about to board is a United Airlines Boeing 757 that originated from Logan Field (Boston). Eerily similar to the type of flight selected by those that attacked our nation on September 11, 2001. I really can’t blame them at all and honestly I’m glad they are doing whatever they feel they practically can to prevent such an event from happening ever again.

I just plan to avoid buying any more one-way tickets unless I have plenty of time to spend with the TSA.

Tips and tricks (part 1)

Trying out some new tips from other photographers.

Shooting assignments always slow down for me this time of year (not much racing going on) so I find myself busy with other business projects and a lot of reading.

Some of that reading nets some interesting tips that I’ve recently tried in my photography. These are some of the ones that I found most useful (or most ridiculous!)

Cheapo flash diffuser

One challenge I’ve had taking indoor pictures of family members (for fun, not profit) is the blown-out image the flash makes especially when using my 18-55mm lens. It just makes them all look like they are wearing some extreme Goth makeup. Not the effect one is looking for when sending pics to family for the holidays.

It tried cellophane tape over the flashhead but that just gave a really dead looking color to their skin (very, very blue shifted light). Of course a custome white balance fixed it but what a pain to setup each time. I needed another solution. And voila.. a few weeks later I read a tip sent in by a magazine reader.

Select one of the semi-transparent white 35mm film canisters. Cut off the end (remove the cap from the other of course, split it and slip that over the pop-up flash head on the DSLR (or whatever you have). Well, guess what. It works, and works well! I can get right in close to the subjects and the light and skin tones look very natural!

Others to follow...