myrjola

<p>To be honest, it's been a long while since I added anything to my PN portfolio as the site as been for a long time a kind of nostalgic first love to visit occasionally for me and this was one of the somewhat rare moments to browse through recent threads. Maybe I should update my presence here to reflect my current state of photographic affairs though.</p>

<p>I'm a bit late to this thread, but better late than never and all that.</p>

<p>In 2002, my significant other managed to persuade me that we should get a cat and so in one evening we went to see a litter of kittens her coworkers cat had given birth. The most active and curious of them was this attractive little girl:</p>

<p><img src="http://koti.mbnet.fi/~myrjola/kissat/halpiskamerakuvat_pentuajalta/keksi2.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p>(sorry about the image quality, this was taken with an old, very, very cheap compact)</p>

<p>I got convinced that we did indeed need a cat and a few weeks later that little girl (whom we call Keksi) moved into our household and has been a steady part of our life since that, now a handsome adult cat instead of a little kitten, but she still reminds us daily that she hasn't forgotten how to have fun.</p>

<p>After I graduated and started working full-time, we thought that we should perhaps get her a companion, as she now had to spend a large part of her day alone. So in the summer of 2004 we gave a home to a stray cat that the vet assumed to be about half a year old; she had been found wandering in a forest. At first things were difficult because she was apparently grown-up enough to be seen as a rival instead of a kitten by Keksi, but in a few weeks they adjusted to live together nicely:<br>

<img src="http://koti.kapsi.fi/~myrjola/photos/digital/tmp/keksi_noki_photonet.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="427" /><br>

The newcomer got named as Noki (can be translated as "soot", due to some black areas of hair on her head and tail).</p>

<p>Of them, Keksi is by far more the calm and practical one (although she has picked up a few quirks, such as occasionally very pointedly leading me to her favourite sofa and expecting me to lie down so that she can use me as a pillow), and Noki the erratic and loud diva who loves drawing attention to herself (we suspect she has some oriental cat in her ancestry). But both of them are very lovable to us in their own way and we hope to enjoy their company for many years to come.</p>

<p>Hmm, around here (in Finland) they seem to be reasonably well available. By looking at a couple of online stores I've used I got the following statistics:<br>

- The first (and largest) has a few copies directly available at their various stores, plus one more in stock.<br>

- Second store didn't have availability information<br>

- Third one gives an approximate delivery time of 2-5 days</p>

<p>I haven't really done wedding photography, but the first photo made me think that at least in that case a bit of fill flash might have reduced the required DR performance a bit, even if it's not a magic bullet to solve the DR issues in every case.</p>

<p>Couldn't reproduce in on my 40D either (with FW version 1.1.1) , all seems to work as expected.</p>

<p>No cat hairs on the sensor so far, even though we have two cats. However, after having my 20D serviced last year I was very much surprised and amused to find a hair looking very much like the ones from our younger cat stuck below the top LCD's (the B/W one showing settings info) protective screen. Apparently it had been somewhere inside the camera and migrated to a more visible spot during the service process. :)<br>

One more reason never to sell/dispose that camera body, I suppose.</p>

<p>Larry,</p>

<p>while I'm not personally active on <a href="http://www.cloudynights.com/">Cloudy Nights</a> , I'm under the impression that it also features an active astrophotograhy forum including plenty of DSLR astrophotography talk, so it might be worth checking out.</p>

<p>The focus looks quite good here, and especially considering the lens has been used wide open, I second Rainer T's comment about it performing very well.</p>

<p>One alternative to using a tracking telescope mount might be making a so-called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_door_tracker">barn door tracker</a> . You could also take several short exposures and 'stack' them with suitable software such as Iris or Deep Sky Stacker; they can calculate the apparent movement of stars between images and re-align the individual images to produce a higher-quality final result. These applications support subtracting a combination of multiple dark frame from the images to achieve better noise reduction than the built-in camera feature amongst many other nice tricks. This can also be combined with the use of telescope mount or a barn door tracker to push the limits even further.</p>

<p>Regarding the focusing problem with things dimmer than Venus, I must admit I'm confused as for me even the stars in Pleiades were easily visible on the Liveview. I'll have to test this again myself when the weather is good and I have some spare time, perhaps some non-obvious setting is causing the difference. If there are any street lamps or something similar that are at least a few hundred meters off I think using them for focusing should provide good results too, at least with moderate focal lengths/apertures.</p><div></div>

<p>Interesting; I don't think I've ever noticed anybody taping the brand names etc. out. Then again, I rarely pay much attention to other people's gear, unless it's something significantly extraordinary (say, a 400+ mm huge telephoto lens), so it's quite possible that I've missed several sets of taped equipment.</p>

<p>Anyway, as can probably be figured out from the above, I don't tape things myself, as I don't <strong>personally</strong> see any need; I don't care either way if somebody notices what brand of camera I'm using or not<br /> , nobody has ever tried to rob me (there are positive sides on being an big and ugly guy :) and it's very rare that somebody wants to talk about my gear (see previous item).</p>

<p>I've had that lens for about four years by now, and haven't had much reason to complain about it. Sure, the image quality takes a noticeable hit when the lens is used wide open, but as long as the focus itself is correct, it's still usable (and IMO the lowered contrast/sharpness is still less offending than unintentional motion blur from too long handheld exposure). Combined with very good image quality when stopped down even a bit, I think this is generally a very good lens as long as the focal length is one that you need or want to use every now and then.</p>

<p>Just checking; are you talking about viewing the RAWs on the camera LCD or on a monitor after transferring them out of the camera? I'm asking this because the in-camera preview uses a smaller thumbnail image embedded into the RAW file and as a result will look quite blocky when zoomed in.</p>

<p>While attaching my 20D to a telescope mount that has a screw for piggybacking the camera on it, I thought that I'd get the camera attached to the screw more quickly by opening the telescope-holding band containing the screw and screwing the screw into the camera instead of just rotating the camera into the screw, as I had usually done. I even took a dime out of my pocket to use it as an improvised screwdriver. To my surprise, the camera didn't work when I tried to take shots. I delivered it to a local repair service, turned out that the screw had gone too deep and actually caused the mirror box to break due to the force exerted on the magnesium hull and passed on other components inside. Although it was repairable, since that incident I've been more patient...</p>

<p>While I didn't have the opportunity to try the exposure simulation with stars today, I tried it briefly indoors, pointing camera to a room lit only by some stray light from outside and from a lit room, starting from a fast shutter speed and increasing it gradually. After reaching some shutter speed (I think something like 1/4s or at least close to that) any further shutter speed increases didn't affect the live view display noticeably anymore (and switching the simulation mode off didn't seem to affect the brightness of things in live view noticeably either; perhaps some maximum gain had been reached?). So unfortunately this is not very conclusive information, but as I was able to focus successfully to stars with the simulation mode turned off, I think it's worth a try.</p>

<p>I don't know if this is of any use, but I also tried liveview focusing to stars yesterday for the first time with my 40D (the weather has been pretty bad around here, so I've been waiting for the opportunity to do this since I bought the camera a couple of weeks ago) and the stars were nicely visible on the LCD, even though I didn't have the liveview exposure simulation mode turned on. I tried this first with Aldebaran and then re-checked the focus with the brighter stars of Pleiades, so it certainly looked like the stars wouldn't even have to be very bright to be visible on the LCD. Perhaps your focus was initially off enough to make the stars too large and dim blobs to see on the LCD?</p>

<p>(The otherwise annoying longitudinal chromatic aberrations seem to be useful for finishing the liveview focusing to point sources like stars btw; once the stars are not surrounded by a green or purple halo on the 10x magnification, the focus is spot on.)</p>

I think the amount of improvements one should expect to get when upgrading from 20D to 50D is pretty much

dependent on what and in which condition he/she wants to shoot. For those who want to print large prints and/or

often have to crop significantly, the 50D will fairly likely be an improvement over 20D. Likewise, people with

interest in astrophotography will probably benefit from the liveview (that's actually one reason why I'm

considering to also getting a now-pretty-cheap 40D to complement my otherwise still very nice 20D). On the other

hand, taking the resolution increase as an example, for people (including me) mostly printing small-to-medium -

sized photos it's not probably a very significant reason for upgrading at all.

 

(Personally, I do see the 50D as an improvement over 20D based on what I've read from reviews and from the

comments, although I'd personally preferred a slightly different focus on the individual improvements; smaller or

no megapixel increase, no R&D effort used on face detection, more focus on dynamic range/noise performance

improvements, more high-precision focusing points than just the center one etc)

I might buy a Canon 40D for astrophotography usage if the prices fall sufficiently due to the recently released of 50D. Generally speaking, the 40D isn't a huge upgrade over my currently nicely working 20D body (and the -1/3 EV sensitivity is actually a bit of an downgrade), but the liveview feature would be useful for getting a perfect focus to starfields; AF gets reasonable rather than perfect results with some of the brighter stars and manual focus is a bit too iterative with 20D.

 

On the more loosely related size, I'm going to upgrade my about 5 years old computer and monitor. Loosely, because processing the photos is just one of the rather many things I do with my machine, but having a quadcore machine instead of a single core 1.6 GHz Athlon XP 2000+ should also speed up RAW processing nicely as well.

I confess being an (amateur) astronomy nut, as well as owning a 6" f/5 Newton telescope. I'll have to admit that I've been using it fairly little lately though. As far as using it for photography goes, I've only piggybacked my 20D on it, as it seems that I'd have to change the focuser in order to actually get the camera sensor on the plane of focus. It's a fun tool though, when I get around using it.

The generic answer is probably "it depends on what you want to shoot, where and with what other equipment". But personally, I'd welcome a stop or two more low-light performance on my 10-22mm lens (it's widest aperture is f/3.5 on the 10mm end). Despite the decent high ISO performance of my 20D, it's still easy to run out of light after the sunset, especially outside the urban area. Sure, a tripod helps, but I don't carry it with me all the time.

Perhaps a DOF calculator like this might be useful; it's an easy way to figure out what kind of aperture provides a suitable depth of field for one's needs:

 

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

 

It also provides hyperfocal distance figure, which may be useful if getting as much as possible in focus is wanted. For example, with a Canon 1.6 crop sensor, 10-22mm lens set a 10mm focal length and f/11, when the lens is focused to 47.5 cm, everything from 23.9 cm to infinity is essentially in focus (print size/viewing distance will have some effect on this, but it's a decent approximation). This should be quite enough for getting everything in focus for, say, a landscape shot. With longer lenses stopping down further into the land of diffraction might occasionally be needed, if getting everything within the depth of the field is wanted (especially for smaller prints the effect of diffraction might not even be noticeable).

I've heard this rumor every now and then on different forums such as Dpreview. (I think the first time I bumped into it was a couple of years ago). However, I don't really know if there's any truth to it or not.

The short answer is "it depends" :)

 

But a somewhat usual set might be something like 10-22mm, 17-40mm f/4L, 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.2L, 70-300 DO, 200mm f/2.8L, a polarizer, Cokin grad ND filter + holder for 77mm, cable release, a couple of memory cards, a lenspen, plus the camera body itself. While going on vacations etc, one or more 'redundant' lenses will stay home. Haven't had any theft attempts so far, I guess I'm ugly enough to scare potential thieves.

Using RAW and fine-tuning the balance afterwards might also be the way to go if memory card space isn't an issue. However, it still makes sense to try to get it close beforehand, so that you don't need to use much time later twiddling with the RAW converter WB settings.

One additional usage for Live View is also astrophotography; while the AF on the modern EOSes is good enough to focus on bright stars, additional manual tweaking can usually improve results further still. This is rather desperate through the viewfinder, although something like a Hartmann mask may help. The other option is to take shots, zoom in at the result in viewing mode and evaluate whether focus improved or not, repeating this as long as necessary. Compared to this, using Live View with magnification is quicker and at least as accurate.

(taken at the right time, just hadn't adjusted camera's clock to

daylight saving time yet so EXIF data lies...)<div></div>

I don't think a rating of 3 is something worth getting angry. It's just somewhat below average, but not truly "bad", so the person who gave the rating isn't quite claiming that your shot is complete rubbish. And as some have already mentioned, the ratings are always somewhat subjective, so a pair of ratings deviating from others does not necessarily have any malicious intentions behind it.