Archive for the ‘30D’ Category
Tuesday, February 24th 2009
As I wrote a week ago I’ve bought a few camera gadgets with some birthday money I got. Now I have received all three that I’ve ordered so far. (I’ve already written about the cleaning kit I got.)
The Phottix Cleon C8 is a wireless shutter release compatible with many of Canon’s digital SLRs. Mine arrived today so obviously I had to try it out.
All the necessary batteries were supplied so it was just a matter of putting them in place.
The button on the remote has a half pressed and a fully pressed state which work just as the shutter release on the camera. Halfway down for focusing, all the way down for taking the shot.
It seems to work fine for the most part, but in high speed drive mode it always takes at least three frames. No matter how quickly I press the remote it will click through three shots.
This is a fun thing to have and allows you to do some weird stuff that isn’t possible with a normal wired remote.
I’ll write something about the Seagull Right Angle Finder when I receive the adapters for it (which weren’t included when I first got it). As it is now it won’t fit my 30D.
Posted in 30D, gadgets, photography | No Comments »
Friday, February 20th 2009
I bought my Canon EOS 30D in the spring 2006 and the shutter still has about 80% of its expected lifetime left, so don’t get me wrong, I really don’t have any plans on upgrading any time soon.
My thinking is that spending $1200 on a new camera won’t get me significantly better pictures. Challenging myself and setting up more difficult photo projects might. And that’s more or less free.
Anyway, when my 30D finally does give in, I will be well prepared. Pretty soon after I got my 30D I started jotting down stuff I thought would be nice for my next camera. Just so I don’t forget anything when the time comes.
So here is my list of stuff that I will try to get on my next camera:
- Dust reduction. Not sure how effective the current systems are, but most cameras on the market already have this to some degree.
- Front/back focus adjustment. Again, Canon has already added this to the 50D. Could be useful if the camera auto focus is slightly off.
- High resolution screen. Three inch, 640×480 screens already seem to be the default so this shouldn’t be a problem.
- 100% viewfinder coverage. It is so annoying when you think you’ve nailed the composition only to find a twig or some other distraction sticking into the edge of the frame. Remains to be seen if Canon will add this to the cameras in the x0D series. The Nikon D300 already has this so if Canon want to stay in the game they should.
- Live view with good AF. The current live view systems are so-so. Having to lift the mirror (and black out the
live view
) to engage the auto-focus is not good enough.
- HDMI output. Another feature which seems to have become a standard thing.
- Multiple shot bracketing. For HDR photography, I want to be able to set the camera to bracket at least 5 or 7 shots. The Nikon D300 can do up to 9, and since this is only a software thing there really is no reason for Canon’s cameras not to have this.
- Auto ISO. My 30D has this in
green square
fully automatic mode. I want to be able to use Auto ISO in aperture priority, shutter priority and manual mode. The idea being that the camera chooses an ISO setting which will make the shutter speed short enough to avoid camera shake. Thankfully, the 50D can do this. (The 40D had this feature too, but it doesn’t work as it should.)
- RAW in full auto mode. When my wife uses my camera she sets it to full auto mode. This means photos will be saved as JPEGs and not RAWs, which is stupid. I want to be able to adjust white balance and stuff just as much for the photos she takes as I want for my own shots. And again, this is something the 50D now has.
- 9-10 megapixel small RAW size. The megapixel race doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon. This means huge RAW files every time you want to take a photo. And more noise per pixel. Which in turn increases the file size since it won’t compress as well. So instead of the reasonable ~7 MB per photo that my 30D produces, the 50D for instance produces ~20 MB RAW files. So if Canon wants to keep increasing the resolution, fine, but give us a more reasonable small RAW setting. The 50D offers a 7 megapixel option, but that’s a bit on the small side. Around 10 should be about right.
- Video mode. I want video recording with good, fast AF and the option of 1080p or 720p.
Then I have a few maybes
:
- DNG raw files. It would be nice if Canon and Nikon adopted Adobe’s DNG standard for raw files, to make them more
future proof
. I don’t want to end up with raw files that I can’t open just because the latest version of Windows doesn’t support the software that came with my camera.
- Wireless flash control. I’d love to have built in support for Canon’s IR wireless flash system.
- Automatic CA and vignetting correction. Nikon’s D300 analyses the photo and automatically corrects chromatic aberrations. The Canon 50D knows how different (Canon) lenses cause vignetting and can correct this by increasing the brightness of the edges. Both these features would be nice to have in the camera, but most of all I’d like to have them in Lightroom. Does anyone know of any Lightroom plug-ins that can do these things?
Since I have four lenses that are only compatible with Canon I’m hoping that there will be a Canon camera sometime in the future with all these features. Maybe it will be the 60D, 70D or 80D? Or maybe they will have started some whole new naming scheme before all these features end up in one camera. Switching to Nikon isn’t really an option anyway.
Well, I’m in no rush at all to shell out loads and loads of cash. I have all the time in the world. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy my 30D while I marvel at the many features the camera makers think of in the coming years.
Posted in 30D, camera, canon, photography | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 18th 2009
My sensor swabs and cleaning liquid arrived extremely quickly, considering they shipped across the Atlantic. I bought them last Saturday and I picked them up yesterday, only three days later. That’s impressive! The weird thing is that I only paid for slow postage …
Anyway, today when I got home from work I decided to have a go at cleaning the sensor of my beloved Canon 30D.
I took a test shot at f/22 before I started. Quite a few specks of dust as you can see, after almost three years of use, only having cleaned it with a hand blower:
I also used my hand blower thing to clean the outside of the camera, as well as the sensor before I did the real thing. As you can see, this didn’t do much good at all. Only one tiny speck of dust disappeared in the bottom left corner:
Next I cut open the plastic container for a swab and unscrewed the top of the bottle. Then I set my camera in cleaning mode to expose the sensor. I put five drops of Eclipse on the swab and stuck it in the camera.
I did a first swipe, flipped the swab over and did a second swipe in the same direction. I’m quite impressed by how effective this was. All the major dust specks are gone and only a few tiny specks are left on the right side, which is where I lifted the swab. With some practice I will hopefully get even better at this.
It struck me as being tighter than I expected to get the swab into the camera. And I was surprised that I didn’t see the cleaning liquid (methanol) drying up in the light reflecting off the sensor. (I didn’t see the liquid at all.)
All in all I’m glad I gave this a go. Finally I can use small apertures without having to do a load of spec-hunting in Lightroom.
Posted in 30D, photography, sensor dust | No Comments »
Monday, September 29th 2008
In the spring I bought a 16 GB Transcend Compact Flash card for my camera. I had some problems getting it formatted. But after I did manage to format it, it seemed to be working fine.
Until our wedding day. I had lent my camera to Silvana who was doing most of the photography. Everything was working fine until after the ceremony. Suddenly the camera said Data Corrupted
. The camera hung when you tried to view certain photos. She came over to me and we switched to one of my old memory cards.
I thought it was just one or two photos that were lost. As it turned out, I couldn’t get any photos off the card at all.
Viewing the card through Windows Explorer there were loads of files with seemingly random 09f2¤!”%-style filenames. The card size was suddenly claimed to be 248 GB (beat that Pretec). I could see many of the raw image files, but none of them were readable.
After doing a bit of hunting around I found Ahlberg Data in Stockholm. The website claimed that data almost always can be saved from hard drives and flash memory. So, hopeful, I sent them my card.
It turns out there’s a little processor in the card that deals with the communication between the flash memory units and and the camera/computer. This processor had probably been fried
to quote the technician I spoke to. Which means that any data you get off the card will be complete gobbledygook.
So they couldn’t either get anything usable off the card.
You would have to open the card and read directly from the memory units. This would involve manual labour (don’t we all hate it!) and would be very expensive. Also, it would have to be done by a company called IBAS in Norway since Ahlberg Data themselves don’t have the right equipment.
But, he claimed, the Russians
are building a machine that will be able to read directly from the memory units, bypassing the processor. (With less manual work required, if I got it right.) He said they are planning to buy one of these when they become available — possibly during the autumn.
Anyway, they were very kind and sent the card back without charging anything for the analysis (or postage). So now I have the unreadable card here, hoping that one day I will be able to salvage the photos from our wedding …
Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking of buying a cheap, large memory card. Please leave a comment if you have had similar problems, I’d be very interested to hear about them.
Posted in 30D, canon, memory card, photography | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, September 16th 2008
I dag tog jag en ny sväng ut i Kronskogen och hittade några fler svampar. Denna gång utrustad med en plastpåse för att kunna gå ner på knä i mossan utan att bli blöt. (Alternativt för att slippa gå ner i 80-procentig split över kameran på ministativet för att kika in i sökaren uppifrån och upp-och-ner.)
Har skapat ett recept i Lightroom för detta lite ålderdomliga utseende. Gillar det skarpt, även om jag säger det själv.
Alla svampbilder finns i en samling på mitt Flickr-konto.
Edit: Här är en till bild som jag gillade från expeditionen:
Min klasskompis från Sundsvall Emma har på nolltid utvecklats till en grym fotograf. (Kanske har hon alltid varit det?) Dagens favoriter var dessa två tre.
Posted in 30D, Eskilstuna, photography | No Comments »
Friday, September 12th 2008
Var ute i Kronskogen i går i jakt på svampar. Hittade inte så jättemånga fina men några iaf:
Posted in 30D, Eskilstuna, photography | 1 Comment »
Friday, September 5th 2008
Yesterday I sold my second photo. Out of nowhere I was contacted by a small Swedish publishing firm called Eddy. They wondered if they could use this photo for the cover of a book about ethics in journalism:
So we agreed on a price and that I would tweak it a bit before I sent it. Here’s the version I sent them:
I charged them a bit less than I did Länstidningen last time, since they are only printing 500 copies of the book. They said they would send me a couple of copies too.
The funny thing is, I took the photo last year at my journalism course for a book we were making, on exactly the same theme. (I don’t remember if we used it though.)
Posted in 30D, photography | 3 Comments »
Sunday, August 31st 2008
Posted in 30D, Uppsala, photography | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 30th 2008
Adobe Lightroom 2 is out. It seems pretty neat with lots of nice new features! What really got me going was reading about the Camera profiles
which are meant to reproduce the colours you get straight out of your camera.
I tried the camera profile for the EOS 30D with the Faithful
picture style. It’s pretty close, but it still renders colours slightly differently. It should be said, this profile is labelled a beta so it might improve for the final release, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
ps. I’m now a married man so don’t waste your time on sending love e-mails.
Edit: After a few more quick tests, it seems that they have fixed one of my love-to-hate bugs in Lightroom 1: When exporting a JPEG, with all the develop settings at default (0), Lightroom 1.x would still change the colours of the picture slightly. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case with Lightroom 2.
Posted in 30D, canon, lightroom, photography | No Comments »
Thursday, April 17th 2008
Yesterday I was in a shooting mood and bought some interesting vegetables and fruit to shoot when I was at Hemköp.
I set up a provisional studio
on one of my chairs. I just used a large sheet of white paper that I happened to find in a photo frame. For lighting I used my desk light and a second smaller light.
I hunted down the correct exposure to make the paper only just overexpose in the brightest corner, and then shot in manual mode.
I used my Sigma 17-70mm, Canon 50mm and Canon 70-300mm lenses. I liked the results best from the 50mm, so I ended up sticking with that lens most of the time. (Except for the real close-ups where I used the 70-300mm + a close-up lens.) And most of the time I had the 50mm set at f/2.8 which seems to be this lenses sweet spot
.
If you want to see more of the shots I’ve put my favourites in a set at Flickr.
Posted in 30D, Sigma, canon, photography | No Comments »
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