Okay, the weather is threatening to turn nice again, I’ve already seen some bees and ants, and I think I’ve got my macro rig in place. I’ll have a more detailed post about this soon, once I’ve had a chance to actually try it out in the field.
So I got the parts for my new macro bracket. It looks good: very secure, very nicely balanced, and I can put the flash where I want to. In fact, it works so well I was able to use the articulating arm without a plate, which really helps with weight and balance. Should be able to use it with a hand strap as well, though the arm is so solid that I can use it to hold on to.
Unfortunately I have no pictures with it yet, because we just got dumped with snow and winter rain. I saw some flies the other day, though, so here’s hoping the bees will be out this weekend.
It hasn’t affected my excitement over getting a pretty decent macro, but I did identify the moth in my previous post as a Tineola bisselliella, i.e., the kind that eats wool. Yes, I found it in my bedroom. And yes, I do have some mysterious holes in a wool sweater or two. Oye.
The parts for my new bracket should come today or tomorrow. I ordered them straight from the manufacturer, so we’re not exactly talking Amazon delivery times here. It’s hard to be patient, because I have really high hopes for this bracket. In this design, the flash is mounted to the plate by an articulated arm with 1/4-20 threads on each end. The cost was higher than I’ve put into a single design before ($60 shipped), but I expect it to deal with two major flaws I’ve been frustrated by: flash wobble and limited positioning.
The first is a problem because as I walk around, the flash itself becomes unstable, and it puts a lot of strain on everything. Earlier designs would use a thumb screw that goes through the plate, which starts to slip pretty quickly; and they relied on a cheap creep-prone solutions to mount the shoe. My Vivitar flash’s hotshoe cracked because of this, and the screw mount on my shorter off-camera cord ripped right out of the shoe. This arm on this design connects directly to the plate and hotshoe.
It’s also going to be a lot longer than a cheap ballhead, with more points of articulation. I’ll have more range and control over where to place the flash, so not everything will need to be lit high, camera-left. I’m a little worried about the balance of the rig, but I’ll find a way to make it work once it’s in hand.
I just ordered the parts for this year’s macro bracket. I’ve never been a hundred percent thrilled with what I’ve made in the past, since I’ve never hit on the right balance of stability and adjustability. (That is, most of them were a little bit of one and none of the other.) This year I’ve decided to spend a little bit more and hopefully end up with a design that doesn’t need to be rebuilt every year. I should have all the parts together in a week or two, and I’ll put it all together then.
Having switched from a manual to a TTL flash for my bug macro work, I do really appreciate the consistency it gives me between shots. I very rarely have to seriously adjust the exposure in post — or if I do, it’s the same adjustment across a series.
Having 2nd curtain sync is great, too. I’ve definitely gotten shots with visible motion blur that are usable, even pretty good, but where I can tell that I would have junked it using 1st curtain sync. The difference is in 1st curtain sync, the flash makes the exposure and then any motion gets exposed while the shutter is still open, so the blur is actually leading the motion; in 2nd curtain sync, the motion is exposed before the flash fires, so any blur is trailing the motion, like our brains expect. The image with this post is a good example: I’ve gotten many photos of sweat bees with leading blur that would have looked fine with trailing blur.
TTL flashes can be used as manual flashes, are generally built better, and generally have a better manufacturer’s warranty if you get them new. The only real downside is the major price difference, which can be really significant when you’re comparing a $40 Yongnuo with a $280 Canon. So the benefits are real and noticeable, but whether they’re worth paying $240 for is definitely going to be an individual call.
But my real point here is that there are two things I’ve noticed lately that may not be obvious to someone considering what kind of flash to buy for shooting insects.
The first is that TTLs fire a pre-flash, which they use to gauge how much light to put out, and then the camera opens the shutter and fires the actual flash pulse. This happens nearly instantly. But some insects, like smaller flies, are actually so fast that they can be startled by the pre-flash and fly away before the actual flash fires — especially if you’re shooting with 2nd curtain sync, where there’s an extra 1/250th of a second to react in. Manual flash doesn’t have this problem.
The other gotcha is that you can’t always tell if your flash is positioned efficiently. On a manual flash, it’s obvious if the flash gets out of position, because you start underexposing; if you don’t change the setting, it’s not going to change itself just because the sensor wants more light. But that’s exactly what a TTL flash does.
You might be thinking, “and that’s why I want one”, but it’s not. You want TTL to automatically deal with changes in scene: changes in focal distance as you back away just a bit, changes in the leaves around the subject as they blow in and out of frame, changes in composition as you follow an ant across a white flower, etc. But you want to know the flash is shooting roughly where you want it, somewhere around 1/32nd to 1/8th power, to take advantage of the fastest flash pulse you can. When you start shooting at 1/4, 1/2, full power because you’re only catching the subject with the dimmer edge of the flash beam, the exposure is basically slowing down and you start recording a lot more movement. Motion blur becomes very noticeable. On top of that, the flash takes longer to recycle, and it obviously drains the batteries faster.
I get around this by checking every now and then by switching over to manual to see what power level I’m basically firing at. If you’ve been shooting with a TTL speedlight and you’ve found some of your bug shots are inexplicably blurry from time to time, this might be the problem.
Neither of those two things are deal breakers for me. In fact, I doubt they’d have affected my decision to get a TTL flash at all if I’d known, since I didn’t get it just for insects. They do affect how I use the 430EX II though, so if you’re thinking about what flash to get for this kind of photography, consider this an FYI.
I’m using a Spyder 3 Express from Datacolor for my monitor calibration. I’ll probably upgrade the software to Color Eyes when I have some more cash, but for right now the basic software that comes with the puck is good enough. I want accurate color, but I don’t think anything I’m doing is that color critical, so “good enough” is good enough.
One problem I ran into was getting it to calibrate the right display. I have a Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (awesome display, by the way), attached to a Vostro 1500 laptop. It’s not my ideal workstation computer, but it works pretty well, so like better calibration software, upgrading it isn’t my highest priority right now. But the Spyder 3 Express, with the bundled software, only wants to measure the primary display, which it wrongly believes to be the laptop screen instead of the external. No amount of fiddling with display properties would convince it otherwise, but I did figure out how to do it.
Go into Power Options, and change the setting for when the laptop’s lid is shut from “Sleep” or whatever it is to “Do Nothing”. Then close the laptop, and open the Spyder 3 software — you only have one display now, so it picks the monitor. Easy as that.
I love my Domke F-6, but as I’ve been expanding my kit and preparing to offer my services as a photographer, I’ve recognized that it’s not going to be the best solution for bringing a large kit to a shoot. I don’t think it would fit two bodies, a 70-200mm zoom and another medium-sized lens or two, plus lighting gear. Additionally, while I personally like the Ruggedwear finish, I wanted something a bit more business casual, so to speak. I’m still completely happy with my F-6 and wanted to stick with Domke, so I ended up getting the Domke F-802 Reporter’s Satchel, a large satchel-style bag, in the normal Sand finish. (Because I’m carrying so much in this bag, I also picked up the Domke Shoulder Pad, which helps keep the weight from getting painful — highly recommended, and you’ll see it in the pictures, but it doesn’t come with the bag.)
Domke calls the F-802 a “Reporter’s Satchel”, but it works quite well as a camera bag. Like all their F-series bags, it’s made of a durable but flexible cotton canvas. I was tempted to get one of the J-series satchels, which are made of black ballistic nylon, but there’s no J-802 that I can find, and I wanted the larger size more than the different material. I was also considering the F-811 or F-812, which are designed to carry a laptop and a DSLR system, but I couldn’t find many reviews of them, and they’re about twice as expensive — I don’t plan on needing to transport my laptop to shoots very often, so I ruled them out.
I also could have gotten an F-2, or even an F-1X, but I decided that I wanted a satchel instead of a duffel bag. For one thing, it’s less conspicuous: the F-802 could be any large messenger bag. Living and working around Boston, carrying an obvious camera bag would also potentially make me look like a tourist or a student, and thieves are more likely to see them as a target. A satchel might suggest a laptop, but every bag’s obviously going to carry something, and I think “maybe a laptop?” is a better risk than “definitely a camera”. Not that the F-2 looks a lot like a camera bag, of course.
The slimmer profile of the satchels is also a draw. It keeps more of the gear closer to my body, so there’s less a risk of carelessly smacking into something (or someone) because it’s sticking out. It does make the F-802 harder to work out of, since the bag is deeper, but I suspect it’s just a matter of getting used to a deep space instead of a broad one. On the other hand, I do a lot of shooting bending or even laying down, and I’d be worried about things falling out if it tipped over on the ground with the flap open — something a duffel wouldn’t do.
The bag is built really well. There are no loose threads anywhere, and all the materials are high quality. The strap runs down along the sides and is sewn to the bottom of the bag, so the weight is distributed over the entire bag, and not just on a few square inches at the top. It also has a rubber tread sewn into it, which keeps it secure on your shoulder. The top flap has a handle on it, made of the same thick cotton material as the strap, with a metal reinforcement underneath. I’ve actually heard of this support wearing through the bag after a few years, but I have no idea if the problem is widespread or not. The clip that secures the flap is very strong, and takes some work to open; I expect it’ll ease up in time, but frankly I like that it’s not going to pop open too easily.
On the outside, there’s a large but thin pocket on the back, which I stick lens caps into while I’m shooting. There are also two zippered front pockets (heavy YKK zippers), large enough for business cards, small notepads, and other small-ish items you want easy access to.
Inside is a lot of storage space. There are two velcroed front pockets, each large enough to carry a Super Clamp and umbrella adapter. Or, though it’s a little tight, a 40D with battery grip (and no lens, of course). The velcro patches on these pockets are very large, about the size of a business card, so it’s easy to shut them securely. Also, the Domke logo is on the flap of one of these, meaning it’s not visible when the main flap is closed — another way the F-802 avoids standing out as a camera bag. (Though let’s be honest: any thief who’d know Domke is a camera bag maker could probably recognize the F-802.)
There’s a second thin pocket inside, which could hold a binder or large notepad; I keep some sample 4″x6″ prints in here, and would use it for any shoot-related paperwork. Between this and the four pockets, you’re probably going to have room for all the cables, filters, spare batteries and other miscellaneous accessories you need for whatever system you’re carrying.
The main compartment is sized for a pretty good work system. Its dimension are 14.5″x12″x3″, which doesn’t account for the natural flex of the fabric. That’s the big advantage of Domke bags: they expand or collapse around what they’re carrying, so it keeps its balance and comfort whether its packed full or is half empty. The bottom and sides are lightly padded, just enough for the bag to keep its shape empty. It’s not enough to protect the contents in case of a serious accident, but if you’re getting a Domke, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: they’re flexible, fast bags that are easy to use, but ultimately you are its best protection from accidents.
One nice detail: the interior padding is olive green, and the unpadded surfaces are of the same material as the exterior (really, they are the exterior), so unless you have a black bag, it’s easy to see exactly what’s at the bottom of the bag.
Since the F-802 is marketed as a reporter’s satchel, it doesn’t include any inserts to keep the main compartment organized. I use the Domke FA-230 3 Compartment Insert. With this setup, I can carry the 40D with 70-200mm f/4L IS attached (hood reversed) in one compartment, the old EOS A2 (I haven’t gotten a second digital body yet, but wanted to see how one will fit) with 17-40mm f/4L on the other end, and the 100mm f/2.8 Macro in the middle. The 100mm Macro is about as large as will fit between the two main lenses. There’s still room on either end of the insert for a flash; I was able to fit the 430EX II and a Vivitar 285HV in, barely, but the Viv is much bulkier than most modern flashes. With these two bodies, three mid-sized lenses, and two flashes, I was still able to fit a 24′ TTL cord from FlashZebra in the main compartment. I can also fit the cameras in with their grips attached, though it’s a tight fit — though the A2 is a film camera with a small vertical grip, not a bulkier motor drive or battery grip, and I don’t know if a second one of those would fit.
The bodies, with or without grip, are pressed right next to each other like this. I took the side padding out of the FA-230, and will probably reuse it as a divider to keep them from rubbing. Everything else is secure. On that note, I can feel the contents of the bag against my side as I’m carrying it, and I’ll probably add a bit of that padding between the insert and the back of the bag for comfort.
With all this gear packed, the main flap still shuts easily, since the clasp comes up between the front two cargo pockets. The sides of the compartment are completely covered, so I’m not worried about rain or snow getting in, like I was with the F-6. The canvas finish is probably less water-resistant than the Ruggedwear, but canvas is pretty good at keeping the contents dry, and there’s multiple layers of it around the electronic stuff in the main compartment.
All in all, I’m as happy with the F-802 as I am with the F-6. I’m still using the F-6 when I’m out on a photo walk, especially doing macro work with bugs, where I don’t need to carry my entire work kit with me. For carrying everything though, I’m very happy with the F-802. If in the future I ever have more gear than this bag can carry, I don’t think I would be using a single bag for it.
By the way: Purchases made through the links provided here support this site and my photography. Please be sure that I stand by my recommendations, and only ever suggest items that I would spend my own money on.
Making myself available as a photographer has meant investing in new gear. Some things I need to fill in certain gaps, like focal lengths that my 50mm and 100mm macro don’t cover, and others to provide durability (or at least redundancy) that I don’t currently have. It’s expensive, but necessary, and as far as business start-up costs go, I think I have it pretty easy, since I don’t need to worry about real estate or vehicles or anything scary-expensive like that.
The first big upgrade is the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM, a wide-angle zoom. I decided to get this lens first for a couple of reasons: I don’t have anything in that focal range, it’s the cheapest of the lens/camera upgrades I want to make, and I can use it as a wide-standard zoom on my 40D (I think I have to put off an upgrade to the 5D II until last).
This is my first L lens, and it’s pretty clearly in a different class than the other lenses I have. Rather than give the same review focusing on technical details that you can find everywhere else on the internet, I’d like to pass over the image quality and instead talk about my first experience using it on a crop body.
It feels solid in the hand, though it’s not a massive lens. It balances very well with the 40D, and I imagine it would with the heavier bodies, too. The front element is huge — it has a 77mm filter diameter while being only 97mm long — and dark. You can see down into the body of my other lenses, this one has more of a “black box” appearance to it. I was surprised at the slight resistance and muffled click when I mounted it for the first time, until I realized that it was due to the rubber o-ring that seals the mount against water and dust.
The USM autofocus is very snappy, nearly silent, and from what I’ve seen so far, pretty accurate. The zoom ring and focus ring are both smooth and quiet, without the dry scratchy sound of inexpensive lenses. I will say that I’ve never had a zoom lens that doesn’t change length while zooming, and that was a bit of a surprise, being one of the little details that had slipped my mind. It also keeps an f/4 aperture through the zoom range, as opposed to others that drop a full stop after zooming in by 1mm from wide open.
I was aware of something with this lens that I’ve never consciously felt before: that this is a piece of equipment that my imagery deserves, and on the flip side, it is not one that I can hide behind when a shot doesn’t come out how I’d wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT one to mistake quality gear for quality photography. But holding it in my hand for the first time, that was my gut response. It’s definitely true, of course, but it’s also true of my 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro, and probably even the 50mm f/1.8 II — the difference is in the build quality and cosmetic design, and I have no doubt that this is exactly the impression Canon wants to give.
We had some reasonable weather the day after I got the lens, so I went out for a photowalk — no flash, no bag, just the 17-40mm on the 40D. With the crop factor, it’s acting as a 28-64mm zoom, which for me is a great focal length. It’s funny that 95% of the time I’ve been shooting with a prime between 50mm and 100mm (both telephoto on the 40D), but I really connect with the wide/standard perspective. I like having that depth without necessarily going ultrawide.
As I said, I don’t want to get too deep into the image quality side of it (this lens has been around for years and I doubt I could say anything original there) but I do think it’s important to say that my initial impression, that this is a lens my images deserve, stands up once I was actually looking at the results. I would comfortable printing a 100% crop from this lens. Color is great, detail is great, contrast is great. This is a lens whose quality you can see by looking through the camera’s viewfinder.
I think what I was really feeling when I pulled the lens out of its box was a sense of confidence: I can rely on this lens. It’s a sense that I don’t have to baby it. It’s not fragile, it’s not plastic, and I’m not worried that some delicate mechanism inside is about to snap if I swing it around too quickly. Obviously I’m going to be careful with it, but I don’t have the nagging voice in the back of my mind that’s monitoring how I’m handling it while I’m shooting. Having actually shot a bit with it, I still feel the same, and the images I’m getting from it back that up.
That’s one less distraction, and to me it’s the most important reason for getting pro-grade gear: if I’m going to book half my day (and possibly half of someone else’s day too) to a shoot out on location, I need to have confidence that my gear won’t let me down in any way. I also need to know that it’s not going to spontaneously die the day after the warranty expires. That peace of mind is what you’re really paying for with L glass.
I hate keywording. I really do. I like post-processing in general but sitting down and coming up with all the possible ways someone might be searching for an image is tedious. Especially as a nature photographer, since there are so many different things about an animal that might be potentially interesting to someone.
Take the name of the animal, like this Andrena bee. Someone may need a photo to actually represent the genus Andrena. Or they might just be looking for any mining bee — in that case, are they looking for the term “mining bee”, or for the family Andrenidae? Or even the sub-family Andreninae? What if they’re looking for any bee? Any hymenopteran? Any insect?
I hate having to put all those in, and honestly I often half-ass it and settle for “bee, andrena, insect”. That’s probably fine, especially if it’s a photo I’m just putting up on Flickr, but I don’t like leaving those other possibilities off the table just because I’m bored of typing in family and order names, and want to get to the next photo.
Lightroom has a way to automate this, through the creative use of nested keywords and synonyms. A keyword can contain other keywords: Let’s say you have a tree that looks like this:
food meat plant fruit vegetable grain dairy
The benefit of building this structure is that when you export an image with a keyword nested inside another, Lightroom walks up the keyword tree and adds every root keyword it finds. So tagging a photo of an apple as “fruit” would also automatically tag it as “plant” and “food”. The tree is one-way: tagging it as “plant” does not add “fruit”, “vegetable”, or “grain”.
Synonyms are related to trees. Instead of an up-and-down structure, it’s side-by-side. So you could add the synonyms “veggie” and “greens” to “vegetable”, and they would all be added to any image tagged with “vegetable”.
Essentially what I’ve started doing is to build a taxonomic tree of nested keywords, all starting under “animal”. Inside “animal” is the keyword “arthropod”, which contains “hexapod”, and then “insect”, and “Hymenoptera”. I’ve started building a structure below this of all the kinds of bees I might conceivably find — I’ve only got it flesh out to about the tribe level so far, and in some places not much below the family, but here’s what the hymenopteran part of the tree looks like when I export it as a text file:
({brackets} show synonyms of the keyword they’re inside, so “hymentopteran” is a synonym of “Hymenoptera”.)
For myself, I’ve chosen to use Latin names as the base keywords, with common names and outdated scientific names as synonyms. Where a common name can apply to more than one species, I put it as high up on the tree as I can. In some cases, like for Agapostemon (a bright green bee with a reflective thorax), I added certain adjectives that will be relevant to any photo I ever take of one as synonyms.
So, I tag the image above as “Andrena”. When I export it, Lightroom automatically adds all the root keywords and synonyms it finds. It ends up tagged as “Aculeata; Andrena; Andrenidae; Andreninae; Hexapoda; Hymenoptera; andrenid bee; animal; anthophila; apidae; apiformes; apoidea; arthropod; bee; burrowing bee; groundnesting bee; hexapod; hymenopteran; insect; miner bee; solitary bee;” — all from one single tag.
I’m also fleshing out structures for other groups of animals that I frequently shoot, and will do the same for behaviors later. All my spiders are auto-tagged “predator” now, for example. It’s an up-front investment in time, but great for days like today, where it’s raining and I’m waiting on FedEx to bring me my replacement flash. And I’ll be perfectly honest: I love automating repetitive tasks, I love taxonomy and phylogeny, and I love directional trees (graph theory is my favorite kind of math). It’s a total confluence of geekery, that, for once, is actually somewhat productive.
As I mentioned before, I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep on using a Vivitar 285HV as my light source or not. I wanted to upgrade to a TTL flash for better consistency and rear-curtain sync, but funds are limited. A couple things have led me to order a 430EX II this morning, though.
First, I found that the guide numbers of the Yongnuo flash I was considering was understated by about a stop. This isn’t really a big deal to me, except for the fact that it meant I’d have to use a higher power setting than I really want to, which means a longer flash pulse. When I considered that along with the uneven build quality, lack of a real warranty, and the other minor uncertainties that come with buying a third-party flash, I decided that I wasn’t confident in putting my money there. All the little uncertainties add up to too much of a risk — the YN-465 is about $15-$20 out of my comfort zone. (I will definitely say that the YN-460 II is not, and if I were looking for a manual flash right now, it’d be at the top of my list.)
The other thing is that I’ve noticed the foot of my Vivitar is starting to crack apart. My off-camera cord has a slightly wobbly hotshoe, and the back-and-forth movement has put enough torque on the foot to start peeling away one of the flanges. I’ve shimmed the hotshoe so it won’t move anymore, but now the flash moves on its own. It’ll be fine as a remote flash, laying on its side with a receiver on the foot, but I don’t trust it mounted to anything where the cracked flange has to support its weight.
So, I bit the bullet and ordered the 430EX II from Beach Camera’s eBay store, which had the lowest price of any Canon authorised dealers after cashback. I wish I’d noticed the damage to the Vivitar last week, when there was a $15 rebate, but what can you do…
I considered replacing the off-camera cord, which is the old “Canon Off Camera Shoe Cord 2″ that was replaced by the OC-E3, but I think I’ve fixed the wobble (kind of a rotating looseness in the metal part of the hotshoe) by shimming it with thick paper.
Once the new flash arrives, I’ll make a diffuser that fits on it in the same style as the one I made for the Vivitar, and I think I’ll have my bracket finished. I’ll post photos explaining everything then. In the meantime, I’ll finish going through all the photos I took last week while I was visiting family in upstate New York. I’ve already uploaded a whole gallery of sawfly photos, which I’m quite happy with — my first real macros at a magnification higher than 1:1. More very soon, I hope.
I still have a few minor things to overcome with the bracket — the raised post on the end comes off, but the screw is too long to mount anything to without it. I’m considering a few possible ways to work around this, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the bracket, and I’d like to move on. I’ll definitely mention what I’ve got when I have a final solution.
So, the next phase is lighting. This is the whole point of the macro rig: dump enough light on the subject to get a good exposure, and dump it in an aesthetically appealing way. There are over-the-counter macro lighting solutions that work quite well, some of them better than what I’m making here. The MT-14EX ring light and MT-24EX twin light are quite good, but they’re really, really expensive. I love macro photography, and as long as there’s something to shoot at 1:1 my 100mm macro lens doesn’t really come off the camera, but I can’t justify spending hundreds of dollars on something I can only use for macro. So I use traditional flash units, which are less expensive and very versatile.
I already have a Vivitar 285HV, a cheap and popular manual-only flash. I’m considering upgrading it, if budget allows, but that’s not certain yet. The ideal flash for this rig is lightweight, for obvious reasons, with enough power to get a fast flash pulse, and has TTL metering. A flash will give you hard, ugly light, so it also needs a diffuser of some kind.
The flash pulse is important for freezing motion: I shoot a lot of bugs, which are very active and very fast. Basically the lighting scenario I’m in most often is one where I’m shooting with a shutter speed close to my camera’s fastest sync speed, or around 1/250, with an aperture of at least f/8, and usually f/11 to f/14, on an ISO of 100 to 200; the flash fires at 1/16th power, because it’s so close to the subject. Without a flash, these settings would give you an unexposed black frame, except on the brightest of days.
So imagine, in slow-motion, what happens as you press the shutter with these settings: For a long 1/250th of a second, almost no light is falling on the sensor. Then, the flash fires a burst of light, and for the 1/16,000th of a second that it’s pulsing, light floods into the camera and the sensor records that image, which by itself is a full exposure. The flash turns off, and the sensor is no longer receiving any light. At the end of that 1/250th of a second, the shutter closes, and the sensor sends its data — all of it recorded in that 1/16,000th of a second — to the camera’s image processor.
The pulse duration of a powerful flash on a low setting is going to be much better at freezing motion than the fastest shutter speed your camera can do. Unfortunately, Canon doesn’t release its speedlites’ flash pulse duration, and even for the third-party companies that do, there are different ways of measuring it. So there’s a bit of guesswork here; I think the only real thing we can do is assume that any moderately powerful flash is going to be fast enough, and choose between them on other grounds. It probably rules out small low-power flashes, and it definitely rules out constant light sources like LED lamps.
TTL isn’t critical, and I don’t feel like I need it at all for my non-macro stuff. It would be nice so I don’t have to adjust the power level if I’m shooting a little further back, or decide to use a circular polarizer, for example. E-TTL 2 can make finer adjustments than just the one-stop power levels of the Vivitar 285HV. It also offers rear-curtain sync — that would let me slow the shutter speed down to let more ambient in, and capture motion trails to show movement. These are generally convenience things, but I’d like to have them.
Two things I don’t care about: Electronic zoom heads are a complete non-factor for me. High-speed sync is actually something I want to avoid using. It sounds like a great idea, using ambient as the main light, and high-speed sync as fill, but the way it works is to use thousands of low-power pulses through the entire exposure; when the subject is a fast-moving insect, that’ll give a blurred picture — like a strobe effect, but probably too close together to look cool.
Considering these things, I’d like to upgrade to the 430EX II if I can afford it. I go back and forth on the Yongnuo YN-465 and YN-467; I’d like to see a comparison to an official Canon flash in terms of build quality and reliability. Considering they cost less than half as much as the 430EX II, I’m willing to cut them a little slack, but I want good odds of getting more than a single season out of them before I drop money on one. Really it’s the international shipping that gets me: if there were a supplier in the US who would handle replacements under warranty, I’d be much more likely to buy one. This all depends on my job situation, too, which is either seriously improving or completely disappearing in the next few weeks, and I don’t have any idea which yet. No new toys if I’m unemployed. Fortunately for me, the flash I have works fine — this is an entirely optional upgrade for me. (I wouldn’t get the Vivitar as a macro flash if I were doing it again, though: it’s too heavy, it has a beveled head that’s hard to mount things on, and it’s expensive compared to more modern competitors. On a super-tight budget, I’d go with the manual YN-460 or YN-460 II as a first flash, or on one of the E-TTL flashes I mentioned above.)
As for the diffuser, that’s important for controlling the quality of the light. If you’re already familiar with Strobist-style lighting, you know this already, and it’s true for macro as well. The diffuser — basically a small softbox — is important because it makes the light bigger. The greater the angular size of the light source, the softer the shadows it makes. It also ‘spreads out’ the intensity of the lighting, so you can capture more detail in reflective surfaces without getting blown-out highlights. The plastic caps, like the Gary Fong-type diffusers, are no good here. They’re designed for indoor use, and send light out in every direction to bounce back onto the subject. Outside, with nothing to bounce light off of at macro scales, they’re just sending perfectly good light off into the void.
Right now I’m using the DIY flash diffusers described here on Myrmecos, albeit using a larger yogurt cup for my larger flash. It may be a bit too large, so I might remake it soon to be a bit shorter, but I’m getting great light from it. I’m using translucent vellum paper ($0.25 per sheet at my local stationary store) as the diffusion material, though Roscoe makes some professional materials for this exact purpose. That would be more durable, and more heat resistant as well — though the general idea is to get the diffusion surface far enough away from the flash head to catch light from a wide area, so I’m not too concerned about the heat.
I picked up a WhiBal color balance card and, though I haven’t had the chance to do any really critical (or even really interesting) photography the past few weeks, it’s already given me great results with some easy, casual shots. White balance is one of those subtle things that’s hard to get right, but really stands out when it’s wrong. Fairly or not, when I’m looking a photographer’s work, it’s the first thing that gives me an impression of their technical skill.
The card is a small, neutral piece of plastic that you use to determine an accurate white balance, either with a custom white balance before shooting, or as a batch setting in post-production. It comes in several sizes; I got one about the size of a business card, because I do a lot of macro and wanted a smallish one, but for larger scenes Amazon carries a 3.5″x6″ Studio size, and there’s a wider variety directly from the manufacturer. It comes with a stand, a lanyard, and a thin, cheap-feeling case; they also make a really small one that attaches to your keychain. One nice aspect of the card is that the color comes from the material, not a printed surface, so any scratches won’t affect its effectiveness. There’s a sticker on one side that’s used for setting white and black points in post, and it has an autofocus target as well.
The WhiBal looks like a typical Kodak gray card used for exposure (in that both are gray rectangles), but the two are used for different purposes. A gray card has a standard 18% reflectivity, so your camera’s light meter gives you a consistent exposure with them. But they’re not entirely neutral in color, and they aren’t even the same color in different types of light — so using a gray card for white balance will give you the wrong color temperature, and it won’t even be a predictable amount of wrong in different situations. On the other hand, the WhiBal isn’t 18% gray, and using it for exposure will be a bit off; I’m not sure by how much, or how consistently, but I’ll bet you could experiment with exposure compensation to meter off the white and black sticker.
In a RAW workflow, you use the WhiBal by placing it in the scene you’re shooting, adjust the angle so you don’t see any glare on the stickers, and taking a shot of it. Then you go on shooting as normal. If the lighting conditions change, take another shot. Once you’re in post-production, you can use the “click white balance” tool of your digital darkroom on the card, and then copy that setting across all the images in those lighting conditions. All the software I’ve used has a batch-copy tool to make this simple. It’s supremely easy and consistent — it takes about five seconds to shoot the card, and another five to set the entire shoot’s white balance.
By the way, in case you’re interested, I’ve measured the color temperature of my Vivitar 285HV flash as 5750 degrees, with a tint of -2 in LR. My 40D’s on-camera flash measures 6400 degrees, with no tint adjustment.
The image of the robin above was balanced using the WhiBal card, and for the photography I do — which is very nature and animal oriented — it’s a great example of the card’s impact. Auto white balance was totally off. The Daylight setting I was shooting in was just slightly too warm, and like many images I’ve taken in the fall and winter, the dried leaves just looked subtly wrong. It’s not terribly visible in the comparison image, but it’s something that’s bothered me for a long time, and I picked this specific image because the WhiBal’s setting made the colors of the dead foliage feel “right” for the first time.
So the verdict is good. It’s easy to use, tremendously helpful, and not terribly expensive, even for a low-budget photographer like myself. I wish I’d gotten one earlier.
The latest version of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software (v3.8) is due to be released soon, and it’s bringing the ability to straighten images — a feature whose absence has often added steps to my own workflow. It probably won’t be as easy as Lightroom’s straighten tool, where you basically just draw a line across the image and LR rotates the image until it’s straight, but however they implement it will be a lot easier than moving the whole image into a second editor.
DPP is pretty handy. I wish the Edit Image and Main windows were better integrated, and until it lets you edit metadata it’s going to be basically useless for most serious workflows, but it’s not hard to use and the image quality is fantastic. There are a few things I would really, really like to see though.
First: Smarter sharpening tools. I don’t mind if they’re a bit slower than Lightroom’s fantastic mask-based sharpening tool or a high-pass filter overlay in Photoshop, but they do need to give similar control. Right now the sharpening tool is a blunt instrument that beats your image softness into submission, instead of a subtle precision tool.
Second: Better batch tools. There’s no easy way to copy individual settings across multiple images. You can copy and paste a ‘recipe’, as Canon calls it, from one to several, but you can’t tell it what that recipe includes or excludes. I may want a consistent white balance across a whole shoot, but groups of photos with different exposure and sharpness needs. This should be an easy feature to add, so perhaps I’m just missing it.
Third: Ditch Zoombrowser and integrate metadata editing into DPP. That’s the only thing ZB can do that DPP and EOS Utility can’t. Zoombrowser might have a place for point-and-shoot users who aren’t shooting RAW and just need basic editing and library tools, but there’s really no need for it to be part of the EOS software suite, except for metadata. And honestly, given the alternatives out there, Zoombrowser looks and feels like legacy junkware: iPhoto, Picasa, and the built-in Windows media tools, all handle basic adjustments, library organization, and metadata better than ZB does. If it’s easier for me to deal with keywording after I’ve uploaded my images than it is to use the bundled software that handles keywording, then there’s something wrong with the bundled software. DPP should have a metadata tab in the Edit Image window, and it should be easy to batch edit multiple images.
(I know that one was a bit of a sidetrack, but as long as Canon thinks of Zoombrowser as a useful part of the EOS software suite, DPP’s not going to get decent metadata tools.)
My last and biggest wish for DPP is smart noise reduction. I’m actually really happy with the NR tools in general, but there’s an opportunity here for Canon to make them even easier and faster. Here’s my thinking: Canon knows how my 40D’s sensor generates noise in response to ISO and exposure adjustments. It knows how that’s different from the sensor in a 1D or 1000D. What I want DPP to do is look at those factors in each RAW image and figure out how much luminance and chrominance noise reduction to apply. Give us defaults to tell it what baseline to go for, like “light”, “average”, or “heavy”, and then DPP can set the NR sliders for us. It would take some cleverness to add this feature, but the hard part — understanding the sensors and the RAW data — is already done. It’d be taking advantage of Canon’s main strength in the post-processing arena, which is why you’d use DPP in the first place.
I don’t honestly need DPP to connect to online services or handle other post-export file handling, though I wouldn’t necessarily mind it as long as my other wishes come true first. I don’t really need brush adjustments either. There are things that Lightroom and Aperture will always do better than DPP, and for the price I don’t mind going over to GiMP or some other third-party program to do them. The fine line, for me, is where the third-party programs sit in the workflow. If I’m moving an image to GiMP, I don’t want to spend more time waiting for it to open than I spend actually doing whatever it is I need to do. So picking out dust spots is fine, but sharpening is not.
If you’re shooting with a camera that supports it, look into using back-button autofocus, which separates the autofocus system from the shutter button. Then, the shutter button starts and locks the light meter, and the AF button, pressed with your thumb, starts the autofocus magic.
Mid-range and pro Canon DSLRs will often have a dedicated button for this (“AF-ON”); the Rebels can use the AE-Lock (“*”) button for it. They all have a custom function that can let you select, basically, which of all these buttons do what — there are actually several ways to map different functions to these buttons besides the one I’m talking about here, one of which might be even more perfect for your work style. I can’t speak to Nikons from personal experience but I know they have this ability, and I assume other brands do as well — my EOS A2 can do this, so it’s not a new idea.
It takes a little bit of effort to retrain your thumb and forefinger, but not much. And for a lot of photographers, it’s worth it. If you think about it, having one button control the focus, the light meter, and the shutter all at the same time doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. A lot of times, the subject of your image is going to need be in focus and exposed properly, sure — but that’s no harder with back-button AF, whereas photos where that’s not the case are going to be much harder to manage without it.
Imagine trying to shoot a person against a bright, colorful sunset with fluffy clouds, and mackerel sky. You’re visualizing a mid-distance portrait with her silhouetted against the background, so you switch over to partial metering, because you don’t want the light meter to find some ugly middle ground by looking at everything: this scene is about contrast and color. So in aperture-priority mode* for shallow DoF, you meter off of the sky to bring her exposure down by two stops, full black, and AE-Lock it. Then you autofocus on the person, but the light meter wakes up again: your shutter speed drops to bring her exposure up higher than you want, the sky gets overexposed, and everything is either noisy or blown out. With back-button AF focus, you could have held the exposure with the shutter button, then focused with your thumb, without the light meter knowing or caring.
*Shooting in manual mode would also avoid this sort of problem, except of course that the light is fading fast in this hypothetical situation, and somebody’s got to keep an eye on the light meter, whether it’s you or the camera.
Another situation where this comes in useful is when you’re shooting in low but shifting light, where the AF drive has to work hard to find its subject in the first place. Imagine shooting a street corner on a cloudy day, with the street signs in focus and readable, and moving cars and pedestrians around it. You get the street sign in focus easily enough, but clicking the shutter button will send the AF hunting back and forth for whatever it thinks you want.
Sure, you can switch the lens AF off, but that’s is a workaround, and it’s easy enough to miss a shot because you forgot to switch it back on again. Back-button AF means you don’t have to think about working around slightly complicated, everyday focus/metering issues like this because they just don’t come up. It’s no harder than having the shutter button do all the work, and in many cases it’s just a lot easier.
Shooting with the camera in manual mode is probably the most intimidating skill to new photographers. It’s not that it’s particularly hard, and there are definitely more complicated skills to grasp, but it’s one of the most visible challenges when you first pick up a camera: how do I use the M on the dial? It’s a sign of status, separating the real photogs from the snapshotters.
Which is crap, because placing technical skills on that kind of pedestal is losing sight of that fact that only the final image counts. Your audience won’t give you bonus points for shooting in one mode or another, and knowing how to shoot manual does not automatically give you the vision to use it. If you’re taking boring pictures in automatic, you’ll be taking boring pictures in manual. Composition is entirely in your eyes and your brain, and all manual mode, or any other feature of your camera, will do is help you translate your vision into a photograph.
That said, learning how to use full manual or one of the priority modes gives you control over the image. The camera cannot read your mind, and unless you understand how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO interact to control the exposure and depth of field, you’re going to up missing shots. Guaranteed. Technical skills are vitally important, and you can’t ignore them without sacrificing your potential as a photographer — not to mention if you spent a lot of money on a camera that can give you this control but refuse to learn it, you’d have saved a lot of money by getting a cheap compact.
But full-manual mode is probably less important than understanding metering modes, white balance, or shooting in RAW and post-processing, for example. It’s easy to do, by the way, once you’ve learned to read the camera’s light meter in the viewfinder — you’re not expected to just know what shutter speed you need to get a proper exposure with a given aperture.
But bear in mind that setting aperture and adjusting the shutter until the meter looks good is no different than shooting in aperture mode and setting exposure compensation, unless you need more exposure compensation than your camera can do — which isn’t likely, except in specific circumstances. If you trust the camera meter to tell you when you’ve turned the dial far enough in manual, you can trust it to turn the dial for you. Just remember you can’t trust it to turn all the dials for you.
(Exposure compensation, in case you haven’t used it before, is easy and useful. Most of the time your camera is metering with the assumption that you want the scene to be, on average, an even, neutral gray — in terms of brightness, not color. Setting the EC will adjust the target exposure, in case you want it brighter or darker than that, or if you’re shooting something that will fool the meter. For example, it’s hard for the camera to know that snow is really supposed to be white in color, and it usually needs about +2/3 EC to get it right. Or if you don’t mind underexposing just a touch to get a slightly faster shutter speed, you can use -1/3 EC.)
Anyway, if you’re intimidated by the big M, try using shutter or aperture priority. Experiment with those modes until you have a good sense of what you’re doing when you’re changing the aperture or shutter, and I promise you your ability to create images you’re proud of will increase 10000%. And don’t listen to anybody saying ‘real’ photographers do this or that. There’s nothing wrong with mastering one new thing at a time, at your own pace, and shooting manual does not have to be at the top of your list.
This image was made from seven photos taken on a bridge over the Charles River, in Harvard Square. The night before had seen strong, warm rains, and a cooler front was moving in, causing high, thin clouds and choppy water.
I made two copies of this, in Photoshop CS4 and in the open-source Hugin. Both of them struggled a bit, since I was using the wide end of the 28-105mm f/3.5-f/4.5 USM II zoom lens — there’s a bit of distortion in each shot that they had to account for, but both did a pretty good job in the end. Flipping between the two merged panoramas, I don’t see a great difference between them. This image is from CS4, because it happened to be in exact 3×5 proportions and didn’t need any further cropping; otherwise it would have been a coin toss which to upload.
And I also made a copy in Canon’s Photostitch. The interface was so simplistic and the results were so bad (it laid out each of the seven photos next to each other in a fan shape and blended the edges, with no overlapping or exposure blending at all) that I couldn’t see ever using it for any serious work. Useless. I uninstalled it.
I’m only using CS4 as trial; it’s a bit easier to use for panos than Hugin is, but Hugin isn’t hard. I know how silly it is to not post the Hugin image alongside for comparisons, but the images are big, and frankly look basically the same; at any rate, Hugin is open-source and free, so I’d say just download it and give it a try.
I don’t have a huge camera kit, so when I came to the conclusion recently that I needed a better way of transporting my gear than an old messenger bag with a widening hole in one of the seams, I opted for the modestly-sized Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Ruggedwear Bag. The practical design caught my eye, and so did the simple, unassuming appearance — it’s nice to look at, but it doesn’t draw attention to itself. The “I am not a camera bag” bags may not look like neoprene lunchboxes with $4000 worth of gear in them, but people are still going to notice them. I guess you could say the F-6 is more classy than stylish.
Now, I have to admit, I can compare the Ruggedwear model to the regular Domke F-6 Little Bit Smaller Bag because I was a bit dumb when I bought it. I ordered the plain F-6 (black, since olive was out of stock) to help me schlep my stuff back home from New York, where I was visiting family for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I had the bag shipped to my home in Boston, where it was not going to do me much good, and in the half-hour it took me to realize this, Amazon had already prepared it for shipping. So I had to order a second bag, and thought again about spending the extra money on the Ruggedwear model. The two bags are identical, except for the color and finish, so most of this review applies to both.
The “Ruggedwear” material is a cotton canvas treated with paraffin wax for water resistance. It’s the same as their “Waxwear” treated bags, which I believe were only offered as a limited run. It’s a dark brown color, and looks in photos like it would have a soft, suede-like feel to it, but it’s a tough, flexible fabric to the touch. Not that it’s abrasive at all; it’s quite smooth, and there’s no oily smell or residue. The logo is a subtle tan color on the front; the black canvas F-6 has a bright red logo, which frankly I don’t like at all.
I’ve heard that normal canvas bags tend to shed small fibers as they age, which can get on DSLR sensors. The waxwear bags are so new, I don’t know if they’ve been around long enough to tell whether they suffer from this problem or not.
Water beads on the surface, but it’s not watertight — the sides near the strap rings are a bit exposed, and I would expect some water to get in if you’re caught in a driving rain. Folding the sides of the top down after you close it will nearly eliminate the gap, but it won’t quite do this on its own. I’m not sure how much water the bag will wick off of the gear its carrying, but probably less than a normal canvas Domke. From what I hear, even the normal Domkes are at least a little water resistant as well. I hope you’ll forgive me for not doing an exhaustive test comparing the two, but I think if absolute waterproofing is a high priority for you, you’re looking at a whole different class of bags anyway.
The F-6 is built well, and feels like a heavy-duty camera bag. There’s no padding, except for the bottom and the insert, so the lenses are pretty well protected, and they’re the most fragile bits anyway. The insert has four sections, and the Canon 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens (non-L) with reversed hood fits exactly in one to give you an idea of the size. There’s a zippered pocket on the underside of the top, and on the front. The clips that close the bag are amazingly strong, and take some effort to open, which I like. The strap has a pair of rubber treads along the underside, for traction on your shoulder, and adjusts easily to a comfortable length. It also has a removable hand strap.
I can fit a lot of stuff in this bag: a 40D with battery grip, the 100mm macro, the 28-105 f/3.5-4.5, a Helios 44-2, an old K-mount 135mm f/2.8, Vivitar flash, short off-camera cord, Cactus radio triggers, battery and charger, circular polarizer filter, a baggy with flash gels, some spare batteries, lens pen, the 40D’s battery and charger, a case of business cards, and a mini-tripod. With this load, the bag is still very comfortable to carry. It’s perfectly balanced, and doesn’t tip forwards or backwards when you pick it up. It’s incredibly easy to access the gear you’re carrying; the balance is not affected by whether the top is closed or open, and it’s simple to just grab what you want. There’s no need to unsling the bag and unpack everything just to get a different lens or filter.
This is a great bag for carrying around a modest kit. If I had more big gear to haul, it wouldn’t be able to carry everything, but it’s not meant for the role of “whole studio on your back” anyway. I’m a big fan of carrying minimal amounts of stuff, and this is an ideal walkaround bag, or even storage bag for medium-sized kits. There’s not much room for me to grow into this bag, but I’ll definitely pick up a Domke 700-02A F-2 Bag (Brown Waxwear Finish) once I have the need.
As for the Ruggedwear vs. normal canvas, I’m glad I spent the extra money. I think I’d like the olive or sand color better than the black, but I do really love the weathered brown color of the waxed canvas. And I shoot in damp and drippy environments often enough that the extra touch of protection is probably going to be useful.
Update: One month later, I still love the bag, and I’m no longer concerned about the possibility of gaps along the side of the lid. This weekend I brought my gear with me to work, in a commute that involved, I kid you not, a ~1 mile walk through blizzard conditions each way. Despite the cakes of snow I had to brush off the lid before I could get to my camera once I got indoors, everything in the bag was perfectly dry.
Update 2: I’ve found that removing the padding from the sides of the insert lets the bag collapse in a bit better when it’s partially empty.
By the way: Purchases made through the links provided here support this site and my photography. Please be sure that I stand by my recommendations, and only ever suggest items that I would spend my own money on.
I’m a long-time user of Linux, and one of the minor annoyances I put up with in photography is the need to use Windows for an efficient workflow with good post-processing control. I’ve been dual-booting with Ubuntu for about a year now, and had frankly stopped really using it because of a few problems I was never able to resolve. I’ve always been more of a Gentoo guy, and what with their tenth anniversary this month, I decided to switch back. Except for this past year, I’ve used it as my primary OS since 2002, so even though it’s a lot more DIY, I’m quite comfortable with it.
Anyhow, I’ve been looking more seriously into Linux RAW processing software. I know there are some really powerful options out there, but I honestly find a lot of that power is more than I need. I’ve currently got the latest beta of Digikam installed and I think it’s about 95% of what I want, but there’s still a lot I need to learn about it.
I’ll be looking closely at its output later, and hopefully it’ll turn out to be a good alternative to Lightroom or even DPP.
Update: I see Google still sends people here when they look for this comparison, so I’d like to point out that this post is outdated. Lightroom 3′s noise reduction is much, much better than either of these two, and I don’t have any of these problems with it.
I’ve put together two 100% crops of a recent picture, comparing the results from Lightroom 2.5 and Digital Photo Professional 3.6.1. Where I could, I processed them identically, but generally speaking Lightroom has much finer control than DPP, so to a degree I had to just ask myself how I’d normally process the image in that program.
The comparisons show the problem I have with Lightroom: the JPGs I get out of it lose their texture to noise. The second crop is a perfect example. There are places that are much sharper in LR, like the tip of the flower bud, but towards the edges of the in-focus region, the fine detail is lost in the noise very quickly, and there’s even some color banding in the bokeh. The DPP crop, though not as detailed in the in-focus areas, doesn’t have that harsh, noisy, almost plastic texture to the bokeh and nearly-bokeh regions. Lightroom’s sharpening tool, incidentally, can mask out the low-detail regions, so it didn’t touch the areas I’m unhappy with.
This image was shot at ISO 200, with +0.33 exposure in both LR and DPP. Noise reduction is 3 luminance and 1 color in DPP; 24 luminance and 34 color in LR. (The DPP scale is 0-20, LR is 0-100. The color slider doesn’t have much effect in either on this image, as long as it’s not 0.) I don’t see much improvement in LR’s noise reduction below about 90, which seems unbelievably high for an ISO 200 image from a 40D, even with the background a stop or two intentionally underexposed. So I don’t know what’s going on here — I have to assume I’m missing something. Do I just need to crank up the noise reduction?
I’m playing with the Adobe Lightroom trial again. I’ve used it in the past and wasn’t happy with the JPGs I got out of it: there was a weird plastic texture that I think had to do with noise reduction, and the contrast just didn’t seem quite there. Canon’s DPP gave me much better results in that regard, even though the organization, tagging, and interface are so poor, so I never made the jump to Adobe.
But lately, the workflow issues around DPP have just gotten to me. I’ve caught myself letting photos sit on the camera because I don’t want to deal with the ordeal of processing them in DPP. Don’t get me wrong: individual photos are fine to work with, but sorting through 200 shots, deleting the rejects, and then getting to the individual picks is a pain. And that’s not even looking at DPP’s total inability to handle data like tags and captions, which means my DPP workflow often has to involve two, three, or sometimes four separate programs to get my work online. And Lightroom can do all that stuff easily.
So, I’m reading up on Lightroom again, and already found some good advice for dealing with sharpening and tone curves in it. I’m looking through old favorites to see what I can do with them, and we’ll see how it goes.
I picked up a Helios-44-2 58mm f/2 lens a week or two ago. It’s a lens with an interesting history: when the USSR got their half of Berlin after the end of World War II, they discovered that they were suddenly in possession of a factory that produced Zeiss lenses, one of the masters of the field. [edit: removed some mis-history]
The Helios-44 line is a clone of the Zeiss Biotar lens, and while it’s probably not optically identical, it has the advantage of being one of the most mass-produced of any lens throughout history, which means it’s cheap and plentiful. I got mine for $12 plus shipping, and it came with a (non-functional) Zenit-E camera to boot. Most of the Helios-44 lenses have the common M42 screw-mount, and adapters that allow you to mount these lenses on Canon EOS cameras are pretty cheap.
So I stuck it on my 40D.
It’s a manual lens. This means that you have to set the camera to aperture priority or to full manual mode, and then set the aperture ring on the front of the lens. It’s also a preset lens, which means there’s a second aperture ring that slides the aperture from wide-open to whatever the aperture is set to — this is because the viewfinder darkens as you stop down, so it’s handy to focus wide open, then quickly slide the aperture down before you take the photo. Modern cameras do this for you, but the Helios is not so modern.
I do find that my 40D’s metering is a bit off through this lens. Setting the exposure compensation to +1 helps, and I might try another stop or two higher just to push the histogram further. Focusing is a little tricky and I haven’t mastered it yet. I might pick up the manual focusing viewfinder screen for the 40D, since I do a lot of that anyway, especially with ring USM lenses.
I’ve read that this lens is supposed to be pretty sharp after f/5.8 or so. I’m not really finding that. It could be that my copy is off a bit (quality control on the Soviet lenses was not that consistent), or it could be that people mean it’s relatively sharp compared to other lenses of its era, but I find there’s a subtle softness to it. This doesn’t bother me. I do a lot of plant photography, and for this, it gives some very interesting results.
The color rendition (especially green) is fantastic. Subdued, but saturated. The bokeh, too, is amazing. It’s very smooth and fluid, and the transition from focus to bokeh looks great. It’s certainly different than my Canon lenses, and I quite like it. The lens is infamous for a strange distortion that appears when stopped down a bit: distant bokeh becomes distorted in a swirly, almost fisheye fashion. It’s not displeasing, though it can be surprising or distracting if the photographer doesn’t take it into account while making the image. It’s definitely interesting — a good example is the photo of Japanese maple.
I like this lens a lot. For the money, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s providing some really great images.
I’ve been using the 40D for a couple weeks now, and taken about a thousand shots with it, doing nearly all my usual sorts of images. I have not yet done any studio macro yet, mostly for lack of small interesting things that I haven’t already shot, and because I haven’t picked up a remote shutter release yet. (I’d made one for my Rebel XT, but they don’t take the same type of jack.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really interested in doing a full review of the 40D. That’sbeendone. This is more about my personal experience moving from the entry level Rebel/xxxD line to the middle-weight “prosumer” xxD line. You may still have an early Rebel model and the 40D is still a great, available camera, so it’s possible you may be considering the same upgrade. Otherwise, some of the later Rebels have a few of the 40D’s features, like Live View and a more advanced processor, but they certainly don’t have the same handling.
Physically, the 40D is easier for me to use than the XT. It’s a bit larger and heavier, but I don’t find it more tiring to use. The opposite is actually the case. With the XT, unless I was using a really lightweight lens like the 50mm f/1.8, the camera becomes front heavy and it’s harder to keep the camera steady. I found the 40D’s extra weight means the center of balance is much closer to where I’m holding the camera, especially with the 100mm Macro.
There are more buttons and dials than you find on the Rebel line. It took a few days to get used to the increased access I had to various settings, but it’s not a difficult learning curve, and it speeds things up considerably. For example, in full manual mode, the XT requires you to hold down a button as you turn the control dial to change the aperture. The 40D has a second control dial on the back for that — and in aperture or shutter priority mode, that dial can control the exposure compensation, a setting that required drilling down in the system menu on the Rebel XT. The secondary LCD panel is on the top of the 40D and provides a lot more information than the XT’s, which is basically just a rehash of the info provided in the viewfinder.
One of those extra buttons is a dedicated AF-ON button. Both cameras can be set to use a rear button to control the autofocus, but the Rebel XT has to use its exposure lock button for this. It took some time to get used to the placement of the AF-ON on the 40D, since my thumb was used to going to the second button from the end, but having both AF-ON and exposure locking available is quite useful.
The viewfinder uses a prism, rather than mirrors, and is noticably brighter and larger than the XT’s. It has a faster buffer and shoots about twice as many frames per second — the XT can take about 3 shots a second, and the 40D takes a little over 6. With a reasonably fast CF card and shutter speed, I’m now able to fire off a burst of 20 consecutive RAW format images within about three seconds before the buffer fills. The shutter button is actually so sensative in comparison that I’ve taken quite a few double shots by accident, where I kept the button down for the fraction of a second it took for the camera to take a second shot.
I’m tremendously happy with the upgrade. I’d felt that I’d come up against the limits of what I could do with the XT in a few areas, and while I was perfectly happy with the photography I was doing with it, the 40D just makes it easier to do as well. The main benefit that I expect to see, and still have not really tested, is the ability to precisely focus with Live View, and I’ll be doing that this week.
I haven’t posted anything new in a while, I know. Partly this is because of work suddenly becoming quite busy, but mainly I haven’t shot anything new in a week or two. I’ve just upgraded to the Canon EOS 40D — literally, I just took the first shots about a half hour ago, and I still haven’t gotten everything configured how I want it — and since I’m planning to sell the Rebel XT, I’ve backed off on using it.
I got it refurbished from Adorama and except for the box it came in and the 43 clicks on the shutter, it’s good as new. I’ll shoot with it for a while before I post my thoughts — I doubt I’ll do an in-depth review, since there are already a billion reviews of the 40D out there, and it’s not the latest model anyway. But I can tell you this much: if you’re looking to upgrade from the Rebel/xxxD line but are on a limited budget, a refurbished 40D body is only $750…
