Single-Serving Photo

Little did I know of the abilities of so-called “tethering,” for I had never tried it myself.

In the photography realm, tethering is a term generally used to describe shooting while the camera is directly connected to a computer. Most often, it is used to instantly push the photos onto the computer so that they can be previewed or, in some extreme cases, immediately edited by someone else for review by an on-site art director and so forth.

So really, “wireless tethering” is a super oxymoron, but that’s what they call it when you control your camera wirelessly or retrieve the photos in realtime wirelessly. Canon makes a device for this, and it retails for $800. I think you’d really have to need it to spend that much.

At least, that’s what Jamie Carl thought, so he made his own. Basically, tethering nowadays is just a standard USB connection, the same connection that you use to download photos directly from the camera (if you ever do that). They actually make wireless USB extenders now, which basically just separate one end of a USB cable from the other using wireless technology. It works just like USB, for just about anything that talks through USB.

I’m not sure what the bandwidth is like, but for controlling your camera, you don’t need much.

Jamie wanted to have wireless control of his camera because he was going to be riding in a car at highway speed, with his Nikon dangling outside on a mounting bracket! It seems like it worked out pretty well!

Check it out on Jamie Carl’s blog.

The Internet is all a-flutter about this announcement Greg Yaitanes made via Twitter that the House, M.D. season finale (airing next month on FOX) was shot entirely with a Canon EOS-5D Mark II. This makes the 5D Mark II the first video-capable digital SLR camera to ever have been used to film a “prime time” television episode.

Yaitanes, who is a co-executive producer and director of House, M.D., said that they chose the 5D Mark II because they wanted to be able to fit the camera into “tight spaces,” they used mostly Canon prime lenses as well as the 24-70 and 70-200 zooms, and that no brackets or stabilization tools were used. I can’t wait to see how the episode looks!

The video was recorded onto large CF cards (Yaitanes said “18gb,” but I think he meant 16 GB), which afforded only 22 minutes of shooting before tossing in a new card.

You can read PetaPixel’s summary of the Q&A that has taken place so far via Twitter for more luscious details, and read engadget’s coverage as well as Gizmodo’s coverage. If you ladies and gents who are technology-inclined don’t already check out those two blogs on a regular basis, you may want to add them to your news reader of choice.

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway? (more…)

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… (more…)

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.