Goodbye old mate …hello new chum

I had been putting off jumping into mirrorless because I’m quiet happy with my two (sometimes 3) DSLRs. You know those very old fashioned big clunky cameras with mirrors. Well my Canon slipped from its camera bag a couple of week back and a favourite lens separated rather than broke (its the second lens to suffer this fate but this time it is still kind of usable at a pinch.) However it was time to seriously consider getting a mirrorless!

I’ve had the Canon EOS 1100D (she’s called the Rebel T3i in the USA, but I just call her Tess) for over a decade and it has been a perfect camera for what I used it for in my business. Filming training clips and documenting various procedures involved in mining, pretty well always in harsh environments, The video was pretty damn good, well except the sound was ordinary (no external mic port) and it was difficult to get anything but jerky results handheld (no stabilisation). Yet the video could be great (on a tripod) and the still photos even better. It has just the right balance between automated features and classic settings. In my view this would make it the perfect sort of camera to give someone young as their first camera to learn on. Similar models are still available today but there should be plenty of second hand ones around also. I’ve already figured out mine can go to a friend and be well looked after. So Farewell and Bon Chance my old friend.

Even though I have a higher megapixel camera already in my Pentax K20D, I opted to stay around the same megapixel size as the Canon, because I really don’t see the need for any more. So I was happy looking at micro 4/3rds systems and once I picked up the new Olympus OMD 10 mark III I knew that’s what I wanted. It is more than capable of doing all the work the Canon performed (only better). Despite being a tiny camera, its a metal build so it feels substantial and it is full of the features only found in a lot of the top models. Better still other than a few things I could not find straight away, I just picked it up and got decent photos straight up. So its back to learning new dials and menus, hmm… that M S A P stuff, but I bet that will be fun. The dials are nice and big so I’ll manage.

Welcome to a new chum and I trust you will be happy in my hands.

The Second Shooter

I had though a lot about which camera (or camera body) to take as my backup on my Kimberley Cruise, the latest of my Endless Summer trips. The logical choice was my old Pentax K100 body, if was just for backup and it takes the other lenses I was carrying. In the past an important aspects is it takes 4 standard AA batteries (which can be bought almost anywhere, even on cruise boats!), if power to recharge batteries wasn’t available. I carry spare recharged batteries and they last several days so that is seldom and issue. Instead I choose to take my trusty old Canon Rebel (EOS 1100D), which was basically my work camera used in mines and for making training videos (it has decent quality video except for the sound). Its pretty light and plastic and whilst I have had two lenses fail it has taken the rough and tumble well. With a small zip bag of accessories I planned to put in my art kit backpack. Storing it, with lenses detached, in my computer backpack on airline flights. Well that was the theory.

This last minute inclusion became my main camera in a lot of situations. The reason was a cheap wrist strap and sling system I bought just before the trip. I love the wrist strap! I have always hated the camera maker supplied neck straps! What proved invaluable clambering over rocks, landing on mudflats and beaches in the Kimberley was the over shoulder sling. Just a word of warning to use this style of sling you must be happy for the camera to hang upside down at your side. This leaves your hands free to do the climbing and support stuff with the camera with the lens aligned beside you body just above your hip is safely out of the action (you should adjust to find the safest most comfortable spot using the clips on the strap accordingly).  Rather than sticking out in front of your chest, which in many situations is in harms way. I tended to leave my bulkier Pentax in its camera bag, which was awkward and sometimes inconvenient in rock hoping situations. It was thus left behind in many landings and zodiac trips. The camera and I where safe hanging on my side but I could also quickly grab the camera in one hand, lift it to my eye focus and take a photo. With the result that a lot of my better photos where taken with this second shooter.

Experiments in sketching and recording sketching photographically

I have previously played around with a web camera to record myself sketching, but sketching is an ultra slow process compared with normal video. So I got as far as figuring a time lapse approach would be better but lost interest trying to do that with the webcam software.

Today I figured I’d try again using my Canon EOS on my homemade copy stand tethered to the computer. I have previously mainly tethered via lightroom, but using the EOS utility from canon has way more controls, including a nifty live view and a system to use a small square controlled by a mouse for focus (not unlike taping a touch screen on my phone to focus on a specific part of the screen.) I was impressed with the results and definitely have a new documentation toy to play with.

A good reason to delete

I have noticed a few significant changes in some of the on-line sharing services I have been trying out recently (enough of the sharing already). Canon’s Irista desktop loader has been tripping a mirosoft .NET error lately and its attempt to Autoupdate kept failing. I was just trying Irista out as google+ photos was getting me frustrated, and I still have a tiny bit of loyalty to Canon. alas I don’t want yet another thing quickly ripping photos from under me and uploading copies to yet another location.


Sorry canon this need fixing but I’m not waiting around I’m just going to delete the Irista desktop app.

Where to store your photos if you don’t have a computer?

Now that almost every smart phone is also a camera. There are a lot of people taking photos and many of them will just have the phone not a personal computer, or they may have to share computer access. The result is often photo spread all over the place. Some on social media sites, other hiding on old equipment or on a variety of computers, USB key and external hard dives. Whilst the idea of cloud storage of photos is not new it is certainly being offered by more and more services.

Canon have had a service, irista, like many other photographic and social media companies, for some time that offers on-line storage, The difference is they are now prompting it as the perfect place to store all your photos and offering a decent 10 gigabyte storage for free, What’s more you can sign up with your log in from a number of popular social media log ins, like facebook, twitter, google+ or Yahoo! As a photo manager this offering are more than adequate you can filter tag and organize your photos into albums or find them by date, camera etc. The on-line web pages can be accessed wherever internet access is available, there are apps and utilities to help upload photos. It can be set up much like dropbox, but after my experience with google+ backup hoovering up any photo or image I work on. So I am just letting the irista uploader sync from a specific directory at the moment  I use picasa to export to that directory and soon after the photos are settled into irista on the web. Very simple but importantly under my control.

There is an important clause in their terms of service, something like this needs to be in a lot of other services, but isn’t.

 6.2. We don’t own Your Content or any of the intellectual property rights in Your Content.; 

The terms of service do go onto some restrictions of what you can upload, and conditions that the service might be cancelled. They are fine, mainly ensuring your account is not used for anything unlawful, but make sure you read them for yourself Canon are also promoting the idea that their on-line storage is the one place to safely store your memories

All it takes is a lost phone, a damaged camera, or a broken or corrupt hard drive, and your photos and memories could be lost forever.

However remember safe storage “forever” just means as long as Canon provides the free service (which is likely to be a long time and they are also most likely to give you the option to transfer out, rather than just shutting down). At present sharing is limited to just facebook and flickr (ie no private sharing via email) and share can ne revoked. At present you can not edit the images on-line, and I see this as a significant limitation compared with google+. So I see this service primarily as a storage and organizing facility aimed at mobile users. I would not recommend using irista, or any other on-line service, as the only place to stored photos but it is a good place to start if you lack your own computer space.

This little teaser video doesn’t go into detail but it should give you an good idea of what they are promoting. If your photos are scatter across lots of devices, (computers, phones old memory cards) and places (instagram. facebook, twitter) now might be a good time to think of consolidating where they live, and a free account on Irista will probably suit most family and causal photographers.

irista teaser video from Canon Australia on Vimeo.

Viva La Difference

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A lot of folk ask me why I shot with two different cameras. The simple reason is I mainly use the Canon if I am likely to also take a movie, or it is to document my consulting work but the Pentax remains my “goto” camera. So I’ve started to take a few comparisons with each in different situations. What I can see (and have known for a while) is the Canon colour is always warmer, which actually does a good job with making portraits more complimentary, but it might not be a as true to the subject as the Pentax capture. The other observation is the canon tends to show more contrast. So the JPEG straight out of the camera can have more immediate appeal.

Enough to change my mind of which is my “goto” camera NOT YET!

.JPG vs RAW (.PEF) vs .DNG

arning, I must preface this post with the advice that this is very much my personal view, based on my experience rather that on a calibrated benchmark comparison. I have the choice of using jpeg, two types of propriety RAW  and .DNG as an alternative Raw format on my Pentax K20D. I have found the decision as to which format to standardize on hard to resolve and opted to save both RAW+jpeg where there is the such an option. So here is a little about my (in)decisions and why.

All my current and past digital cameras and cameraphones have all captured .jpeg files and my photo collection is dominated by that format. I have come to appreciate picasa as the very best way to manage jpeg files, its fast, simple and behaves. My many mistress project has lead me to see that previewing jpeg thumbnails is by far my preferred way to cull and organise my photos as I load them. At this stage whilst I might do a little cropping I tend not to do any elaborate post processing. Occasionally at this stage I will email images and very occasionally upload them to the net which generally require resized jpeg version (again picasa does this well) without much photo retouching.

There is also no doubt in my mind that you can coax much more out of RAW files than you can get out of the equivalent jpeg. The reasons for this is buried in the image "development" process happening in the camera, to take the sensor readings and produce an image. There are several steps, demosaicing of the Bayer array, white balance assumption, tone mapping, colour saturation and contrast, then image compression before it is written to the camera memory card.. Probably the biggest limitation is that the image must be packed into an 8 bit representation. Each step requires interpretive decision about how to preform the development and many are not easily recovered if the steps lead to less than desirable processing. That’s where having access to the original information in a RAW format file is a big advantage, but now the steps must be specifically undertaken by the photographer, which takes time and experience. Often a lot of time! The jpeg representation, or at least a suitable small sized thumbnail of it, is also needed at the camera itself to be display on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. 

Pentax JPEG *** (5.9MB)	Pentax JPEG **** (10.0MB)

There is a trade off between the time take to write the large RAW files and the smaller jpeg files, which can mean that you can take fewer images per second, because there can be a bottleneck writing to the card, When you just shoot raw, the jpeg development steps are likely to be run anyway, not only for the image on the LCD screen but most Raw files also include this jpeg thumbnail, for use in quickly previewing the Raw file contents. So in RAW+jpeg both file formats must be written to you to your memory card and it is then just an issue of time taken to write both and extra space required. So fewer unique images fit on the memory card before it is full. Rather than opt for a larger memory card. I've chosen to have several 4 & 8GB cards that have faster read write access, so other than having to change cards more often I probably don't see much difference. There is one exception which is tracking birds in flight and I'll discuss this in a future post.

Pentax RAW  .PEF (13.2MB)	Pentax RAW  .DNG (23.1MB)

I have a Pentax which is one of the few manufacture that offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG can have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can be 15 to 20% smaller than the equivalent RAW files if they are lossless compressed. This is may be why many photographers have chosen to convert their RAW files to DNG on import. Anyone that has tried the convert on import into lightroom will know that this is simple but a very time consuming process, On a full card this is not just time for a quick coffee this is tme to have dinner and some. However when I choose that format on my Pentax K20D camera, the DNG files are uncompressed and they are almost double the size of the PEF files. Against this there are some differences, just differences not improvements, in how the images are rendered particularly in lightroom and I can't see any advantage capturing in DNG

Cannon JPEG (4.5MB)	Canon RAW .CR2 (16.8MB)

Because of the time/file size trade-off I have stuck with using more compressed versions of the jpeg files (on my Pentax this is the JEPG *** rather than the uncompressed JPEG**** format) when using the RAW+jpeg. This compressed option is the only one available on my canon when using RAW+jpeg. The images posted above are all jpeg files of reduced size, so they can be dispalyed on the web. So it is not possible to show the subtle details and differences here. I have also uploaded the unedited files to my google+ JPEG vs RAW vs DNG photo album. If you are interested this may given extra insight.

So I hope you understand why I choose to store RAW+jpeg and have opted to stick with the PEF format (and .CR2) rather than use DNG from the camera. I do use the DNG format in some special circumstances but that’s for another post.This discussion is prompted by to my thinking longer term focus

 Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

More experiments with RAW on Google+

Despite the fact that I couldn't yet see any compelling reason to go over to uploading RAW images into google+, I still wanted to have a play and see what it can offer. So I went an took a couple of pictures of the gingko in my cretaceous garden. I had been a bit worried because it has not spouted any leaves and it its well into spring. Luckily they appeared two days ago and are developing well. The first set where taken with my pentax, which lets me save files in either the pentax propriety raw format .pef or adobe's .dng format, I've also uploaded the .jpg  version captured at the same time. I was actually a bit disappointed because whilst I thought the background was out of focus it was a bit strong (more on that later)

I then took another two photos with my canon this time with the aperture wide open to dramatize the depth of field blur.

Normally I upload to google+ via picasa but trying to upload raw files from it triggers a jpeg version to be generated in the process, not what I wanted so I decided to do this via my google drive. You can also upload via your browser, but that is a bit more work. Whereas yesterday auto enhance seemed to be toggled off, today it was toggled on, so this turned out to be a fairly low effort way to get half decent renditions of my photos. The downside is the background sync from my google drive took several minutes, so its a case of copy to the google drive locally and go and get a cup of coffee.

Whilst once I was very interested in the "auto fix" features of photo processing software I've come to prefer to tweak the sliders myself. This of course take time. The google+ plus path is classic google (I'm feeling lucky) where its all done for you behind the scenes. I must admit it isn't bad but I still prefer to do my own adjustments so I had a look how I might be able to fix the background dominance. I used the .pef file and I chose the selective adjust option which allows you to select a part of the image and this will find similar pasrt of the image to be selectively processed, You can adjust the size of a circular area to work with and the effect feathers off outside that (its shown in red above). You can also have more than one selective area. It does not offer blurring as an adjustment but I was able to decrease contrast and reduce saturation to take the background dominance away. Achieving something closer to what I remember in the view finder as I was photographing.

I'm impressed there is a lot of power here, if you are already have good software for processing RAW files I'm sure you'll be able to do better.  However if you are new to RAW, have it on you camera but have been afraid to try it, give google+ photo and google drive a go, they are free after all, you just need a google account and be using a chrome browser. Oh that's right, also make sure you have a good data plan first because uploading the large RAW files will be a bandwidth hog.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and I had just dropped a grape into my iced soda, when It became "alive" and dances in the moment. I was so fascinating to watch I grabbed my new little Canon EOS 1100D, which takes HD movies by the way. My main difficulty is the movies it takes are in .MOV format and not having an Apple Mac I find the movies a little hard to view (the free Quicktime, which is always very slow to load and seems to  leave the movie clips very jerky, Lightroom and Picasa are worse). However I have discovered, by accident, that the Windows Live Movie Maker does a good job, but you need to wait while it "prepares" the video (I assume this is some sort of necessary CODEC conversion). Saving the movie (in .WMV format) lets me use Picasa, my DVD creator and even upload to You Tube.

I'm not suggesting I am a fan of one format over another, its just that .MOV format can be a bit of a hassle if you have a modern PC.