Single-Serving Photo

I generally post articles when I have something very useful to say, which is why my posts have been so sporadic. There are a myriad of sources for photography industry news and I always feel I am doing my readers a disservice by parroting every new equipment release or software upgrade here.

This time, though, a piece of “news” hit my screen that I had to share, and I hope that by reading it here you will receive the whole story and not just 1/3 of it as some people did when they got the information from digg, reddit, or similar.

We’re talking about megapixels, and we’re talking about marketing, and we’re talking about lies. Lies perpetrated by the manufacturers of point-and-shoot cameras with tiny little CCD sensors who keep increasing the megapixel count and marketing it like it’s the end-all be-all of imaging performance.

Not so! Read on… Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here it is, folks. As reported by Digital Photography Review, Rob Galbraith DPI, Engadget, and undoubtedly more, Canon has officially released the EOS-1D Mark IV, the latest digital SLR in their 1-series (“pro”) line.

I find it somewhat amusing that they chose to throw on the EF 50mm f/1.4 for their promo shoot; a lens that, for me, spontaneously stopped auto-focusing after only a couple years of use and that exhibits pretty significant vignetting. Nevertheless, the EOS-1D Mark IV is a fairly intense camera body, with its 10 frame per second burst mode, and ISO settings up to 102,400. You should be able to lay your hands on one here in the States for a mere $4,999.

Personally, I don’t think I’ll be purchasing a 1D Mark IV, if only because it has an APS-H sensor with a 1.3x crop factor and I am utterly spoiled by my 5D’s full-frame sensor. It is worth noting, also, that for the $4,999 that a brand new 1D Mark IV is going to cost you, you can pretty readily find a pre-owned 1Ds Mark III, which is 21 megapixels of full-frame goodness.

It really excites me that people are out there coming up with new techniques for photographing difficult subjects. It excites me even more that National Geographic has it in their budget.

Over on the right you see a photograph taken by Michael “Nick” Nichols (and his team) for National Geographic, which is on the cover (well, part of it is on the cover, it’s a huge photograph) of the October issue of the magazine.

The image was made by jigsawing 83 separate photographs together (which you can probably tell by the jagged edges), each of which was taken by one of three DSLR cameras mounted on a gyroscope-leveled, pulley-lowered rig that Nichols and his team designed for the purpose. You can check out the photo on Hack a Day of Nichols with his rig; it looks like they’ve got six Pocket Wizards on there (I don’t know what the other three are for) and maybe a couple of bicycle wheels. All in all, a very righteous hack.

This particular redwood is allegedly the “most architecturally interesting” tree in the world, with several forks and bends stretching 300 feet into the sky. It’s only been standing there for over 1,500 years(!!), but now it has been recorded in the annals of photographic history forever.

Via (one of my favorite blogs) Hack a Day, via National Geographic, via NPR

Buchstabensuppe, by tillwe

For those of you Nikon shooters out there who ritualistically browse the B&H catalog and wonder What on Earth is a f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR DX lens, anyway?, now there is an answer for you, straight from our favorite bringer-of-technological-clarity, Bob Johnson at Earthbound Light.

In his post Nikon Lens Designation Alphabet Soup, Bob explains the meaning of all of those little acronyms that Nikon seems to throw around like confetti. At last, an understandable answer!

Today we wrapped up our “Colonial Cape Cod” workshop (I’m writing this in our little Radisson hotel room, just about to pack up and leave). Here’s a peek at Chris and one of our workshop participants admiring a pretty nice sunset on the National Seashore (taken with my 15mm fisheye lens):

As the sun got lower, the sky got even more interesting. Here’s one of the keepers from that group that I can show off because it’s my blog so I get to subject you to whatever I want:

Coming up, we’ve got a really cool workshop in Acadia National Park in Maine (that’s October 16th through 18th), and then in November we’ll be doing yet another one-day Boston workshop if anyone wants to walk around the freezing streets of Beantown and pick up some tips.