Canon 20D initial impressions - real world field test
It's been unseasonably warm and dry here in the Pacific Northwet (no, I did not mispell that) and yesterday was no exception.
Despite some mechanical difficulties with the photo project car I did make the 180 mile trek to Portland International Raceway to try out the new camera. The journey was well worth it from both a photographic and a motorsports standpoint.
Camera Performance
In a single word, flawless. Well, nearly flawless. During the first 100 frames or so shot I had three seperate instances of an 'Error 99' condition that would hand up the camer requiring me to turn it off then back on again and in one case remove the battery to clear the condition.
I'm not sure how many frames I lost during those incidents but they were far from enjoyable. It seemed to have something to do with the shutter. Perhaps it was due to the camera being new because after the three instances I continued to shoot for the remainder off the day (about 800 frames) without a hitch. In fact at no point, despite leaning on the shutter release pretty hard, did I run out of frame buffer and have to wait for it to write to my relativly slow (20x) cards.
There are three auto-focus modes on this camera and unfortunatly I was about 1/2 way though the day before I reliezed I was using the incorrect setting, 'One Shot'. This is why I try to do some shakedown events before the big paying gigs start with the regular racing season.
That is not to say these track day events are not important. In fact I enjoy them as much if not more than the bit international events. Access to participants is unlimited, there are no crowds to fight. It's a very relaxing way to shoot pics and try out some new techniques and not have to worry about a client/editor questioning the more experimental of compositions.
Digressing, the camera is a joy to work with. The added weight over the 300D was not an issue at and the added rubber grip areas on the body are well located making it very easy to handle.
The massive (compared to what I am used too) frame buffer and quick 5 fps made action shots far easier to compose but I did burn though 2.5 GB of memory in less than 3 hours. Much faster than I had expected! No problem, memory is pretty cheap these days.
Having only had less than 24 hours to really familiarize myself with the body before the shoot and having to arise at 4:45am to make the track on time, reading the manual was a luxury I was not able to enjoy before my trial-by-fire test. Thus, as mentioned before I was working with the AF setting most of the day.
The cars were moving along the track at a fast pace so once I switched over to AI Servo and AI Focus did things quite literaly maintain a much better focus.
My inital impressions of the camera's performance and ease of menu navigation gives the camer a 9 of 10. I don't know that there will ever be a perfect camera for me but this one is pretty nice and quite affordable compared to the 1D line of bodies.
Experimentation
As mentioned I spent a good portion of the afternoon experimenting around with some techniques other track photographers I've met suggested and I'll give a short review of them here.
Slow shutter speed
After having a number of my photos reviewed one of the tips given me was to show down my shutter speed. Typically I shoot at the faster speed that ISO 100 and light allows. This does a great job of keeping things sharp but it tends to freeze the spokes of wheels and give the meachine an almost 'parked' feel to them robbing the images of action.
Taking this into consideration I slowed my speed to approximatly 1/4 of my normal speeds for most of the day. Granted some of the sharpness issues were panning errors on my part and the spokes of wheels certainly did become more blurred I found the sharpenss of the images especially in cases of near on-axis approach/departuer left too much blur in the rest of the subject as well. Next time out I'll not cut the speed down so much and see how that affects the way wheels look. I'll post some example pics later on this week as I do have over 1000 images to review and process.
Angles, mixing things up a bit
Another suggestion was that the images although framed well lacked a certain amount of artistic expression. Not one to deny expressing myself I cut loose with new angles and camera possitions and realy learned some interesting things.
One lesson that supprised me was that shooting from track level is not always the most interesting. In fact I found some of track-level images quite horrid (and I promise will never see the light of a CRT if I can help it) and some of the images I like best (especially from Turn 9) were taken atop the grand stands.
A few notable exceptions were the images of a Porsche 911 losing control and heading straight towards me before the driver regained control at the last moment spreaying dust and rock into the air. Outside of that, most of the track level images taken in turns 1, Festival and 9 where quite unremarkable until I started to introduce some more tilt to the camera off the 'normal' horizontal orientation.
Playing around with the off angle provided some very pleasing results.
*More to come...
Despite some mechanical difficulties with the photo project car I did make the 180 mile trek to Portland International Raceway to try out the new camera. The journey was well worth it from both a photographic and a motorsports standpoint.
Camera Performance
In a single word, flawless. Well, nearly flawless. During the first 100 frames or so shot I had three seperate instances of an 'Error 99' condition that would hand up the camer requiring me to turn it off then back on again and in one case remove the battery to clear the condition.
I'm not sure how many frames I lost during those incidents but they were far from enjoyable. It seemed to have something to do with the shutter. Perhaps it was due to the camera being new because after the three instances I continued to shoot for the remainder off the day (about 800 frames) without a hitch. In fact at no point, despite leaning on the shutter release pretty hard, did I run out of frame buffer and have to wait for it to write to my relativly slow (20x) cards.
There are three auto-focus modes on this camera and unfortunatly I was about 1/2 way though the day before I reliezed I was using the incorrect setting, 'One Shot'. This is why I try to do some shakedown events before the big paying gigs start with the regular racing season.
That is not to say these track day events are not important. In fact I enjoy them as much if not more than the bit international events. Access to participants is unlimited, there are no crowds to fight. It's a very relaxing way to shoot pics and try out some new techniques and not have to worry about a client/editor questioning the more experimental of compositions.
Digressing, the camera is a joy to work with. The added weight over the 300D was not an issue at and the added rubber grip areas on the body are well located making it very easy to handle.
The massive (compared to what I am used too) frame buffer and quick 5 fps made action shots far easier to compose but I did burn though 2.5 GB of memory in less than 3 hours. Much faster than I had expected! No problem, memory is pretty cheap these days.
Having only had less than 24 hours to really familiarize myself with the body before the shoot and having to arise at 4:45am to make the track on time, reading the manual was a luxury I was not able to enjoy before my trial-by-fire test. Thus, as mentioned before I was working with the AF setting most of the day.
The cars were moving along the track at a fast pace so once I switched over to AI Servo and AI Focus did things quite literaly maintain a much better focus.
My inital impressions of the camera's performance and ease of menu navigation gives the camer a 9 of 10. I don't know that there will ever be a perfect camera for me but this one is pretty nice and quite affordable compared to the 1D line of bodies.
Experimentation
As mentioned I spent a good portion of the afternoon experimenting around with some techniques other track photographers I've met suggested and I'll give a short review of them here.
Slow shutter speed
After having a number of my photos reviewed one of the tips given me was to show down my shutter speed. Typically I shoot at the faster speed that ISO 100 and light allows. This does a great job of keeping things sharp but it tends to freeze the spokes of wheels and give the meachine an almost 'parked' feel to them robbing the images of action.
Taking this into consideration I slowed my speed to approximatly 1/4 of my normal speeds for most of the day. Granted some of the sharpness issues were panning errors on my part and the spokes of wheels certainly did become more blurred I found the sharpenss of the images especially in cases of near on-axis approach/departuer left too much blur in the rest of the subject as well. Next time out I'll not cut the speed down so much and see how that affects the way wheels look. I'll post some example pics later on this week as I do have over 1000 images to review and process.
Angles, mixing things up a bit
Another suggestion was that the images although framed well lacked a certain amount of artistic expression. Not one to deny expressing myself I cut loose with new angles and camera possitions and realy learned some interesting things.
One lesson that supprised me was that shooting from track level is not always the most interesting. In fact I found some of track-level images quite horrid (and I promise will never see the light of a CRT if I can help it) and some of the images I like best (especially from Turn 9) were taken atop the grand stands.
A few notable exceptions were the images of a Porsche 911 losing control and heading straight towards me before the driver regained control at the last moment spreaying dust and rock into the air. Outside of that, most of the track level images taken in turns 1, Festival and 9 where quite unremarkable until I started to introduce some more tilt to the camera off the 'normal' horizontal orientation.
Playing around with the off angle provided some very pleasing results.
*More to come...
posted by Foto Veloce at Sunday, March 06, 2005
3 Comments:
hey Dave. Good on ya for trading up to a new camera. You said "...I slowed my speed to approximatly 1/4 of my normal speeds for most of the day..." That still doesn't tell me what your shutter speed was. Typically when I was shooting races at SIR (now PR) I never got below 1/15th. OK, maybe 1/8 if I was feeling really cocky. If a car or a motorcycle is moving anywhere at speed, that's plenty slow enough allow the wheels to blur without being so slow that camera shake becomes too much of a problem. But then again, with Photoshop you can always go back, select the wheels and give them some motion blur after the fact. Not a purists approach but doable. Don't give up, tho: high speed pans on rapidly moving objects is not as easy as it sounds. Easier to pan horizontally than panning down and then accross, etc. (as when a vehicle comes down a hill and dives into a corner). Practice, practice, practice!!
As for framing at a track: trackside is very rarely any good. You have to get higher... in the bed of a pick up or on the roof of a van. If it's possible to stand on a retaining wall before someone yells you down, do it. Otherwise, check into some kind of lightweight shooting ladder. There are some on the market but you'll have to find 'em because I've lost my sources over the years I've been out. Good luck!
Hey Phil,
Thanks for the comments. I enjoyed talking to you about this a few days later at the Daytona 200 party (what happend to crew from last year?).
Digressing. If you check the pics in my latest gallery almost all of them have the EXIF data in tact. The data display is enabled so others may learn from my mistakes. Most of those shots were done at ISO 100 with at a speed of 1/100th a second or there abouts.
Others have commented that some of the best of those shots were at 1/250th of a second. This will be hard to replicate when I try out my polarizer next time (I really did not expect a sunny day in the Pacific Norhtwet during winter). Perhaps the F:2.8L lens would be a better choise but the lack of stabilization concerns me. Only way to find out is to keep shooting.
Again, that's for your expert feedback and mentoring!
Hey Phil,
Thanks for the comments. I enjoyed talking to you about this a few days later at the Daytona 200 party (what happend to crew from last year?).
Digressing. If you check the pics in my latest gallery almost all of them have the EXIF data in tact. The data display is enabled so others may learn from my mistakes. Most of those shots were done at ISO 100 with at a speed of 1/100th a second or there abouts.
Others have commented that some of the best of those shots were at 1/250th of a second. This will be hard to replicate when I try out my polarizer next time (I really did not expect a sunny day in the Pacific Norhtwet during winter). Perhaps the F:2.8L lens would be a better choise but the lack of stabilization concerns me. Only way to find out is to keep shooting.
Again, that's for your expert feedback and mentoring!
Post a Comment
<< Home