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So Canon have just introduced the 60D and a selection of new professional lenses.
The 60D is an interesting camera, as it’s not an obvious follow-on to the 50D. Instead, since the 7D sort of takes on that role, the 60D has been repositioned and now fits a new middle ground between the 7D and consumer-level EOS bodies.
The key points are:
I must be living in the future. All the stuff that used to be free on planes - snacks and blankets and things - are now chargeable. At least with this US domestic flight. (the flight from London wasn’t quite as parsimonious)
But I can access the Internet via WiFi at a fairly decent speed. Crazy times! Cost me a few dollars, but I was able to get some work done and chat with friends.
Okay. I’ve been forced to disable comments on this site.
Thanks to those bottom-feeding slimes who operate spambots, I was wasting too much time deleting comment spam each day. If you do have comments, please use the feedback form on this site. Thanks!
Attention all space cadets in the San Francisco Bay Area! The amazing Raygun Gothic Rocketship has landed at Pier 14 for a several month stint. Here’s your opportunity to see this fantastic Burning Man art installation in the proverbial flesh.
Sadly, some parasitic alien spiders escaped the bio containment lab, so they can’t allow anyone to enter the vehicle. But it’s still pretty awesome from the outside.
If you can’t visit San Francisco anytime soon, check out some of my photographs of the work, including some rare pics of the incredibly elaborate interior!
An opinion piece on the Editorial Photographers UK/Ireland site, declaring that photojournalism as we know it is dead.
http://www.epuk.org/Opinion/961/for-gods-sake-somebody-call-it
I’m doing a write zeroes format of my new 2 terabyte drive to give it a bit of a workout. My computer is writing 2,000,398,934,016 bytes. Taking quite a few hours.
It sometimes amazes me how we take this all for granted. I mean, imagine we had to do this by hand and had no robots to do it for us. At some point in human history some person wrote the 2,000,398,934,016th character ever. It must have been zillions of years since that long-forgotten time in history that our species invented writing.
Back in the 90s Canon produced two EOS film cameras, the 10/10s and the Elan/100, which both supported barcodes. This strange feature was supposed to let novices adjust camera settings by waving a barcode-reading wand over a sample photo in a book. Needless to say the feature sank after that, as it was inconvenient and really didn’t serve any particular purpose.
Now in 2010 it appears Canon is going to be selling a modified version of the EOS 7D digital camera with barcode support again. However, this time the barcode functionality will actually be useful, albeit for a very narrow target market.
It seems the barcode 7D will support USB barcode scanners, and will embed the barcode data into the EXIF metadata associated with a photo. This will be useful for automated systems and cases where it’s necessary to track large volumes of images. The limited edition 7D will also have firmware lockout to prevent untrained users for altering camera settings.
Not, in short, useful features for most people. Certainly not for me! But an absolute godsend for any studio photographers who churn out pictures. Think school photographers, for example. Get the kids to fill in a form, stick a barcode onto the forms, scan the barcode into the camera, and a unique number is linked in the camera’s EXIF data to that kid. Then you won’t get the kid and name mixed up. Any assembly-line studio photography will benefit from this sort of thing.
It’s always interesting when a camera maker releases an unusual limited edition model for a niche market. Like the EOS 20Da for astronomical applications. Or the Fuji camera with UV and IR sensitivity for the law enforcement market.
Reported by Rob Galbraith.
Update: the official name of the camera is the 7DSV, for Studio Version. Nothing to do with cheesy underwater TV shows.
American photographer Taryn Simon spent several days photographing some of the strange, depressing and bizarre items confiscated by customers officers at Kennedy International Airport.
After snapping a few shots, my daughter asked to see the pictures.
“You can’t. This is a film camera.”
Blank stare.
“It records the images to this stuff inside the camera called film.”
It’s easy for oldies like me to remember that there’s a whole generation of humans out there now who won’t know what film even was.
Okay, so it’s larded with the obligatory clichéd parade of American pop songs from the era, but this video is quite interesting on a number of levels. In 1969 an American kid named Jim Sugar did a photo shoot in Ireland for National Geographic, and now a man in his 60s is revisiting the same locations and the same people - or their descendants.
It seems amazing today that a magazine would have the budget to send a young guy overseas to shoot 10,000 slides for a cover story. And Sugar talks about the weekly routine of shipping his Kodachromes to DC, air freight. A very different time for Ireland, and very different for photojournalism.
http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1077155 (viewable until 10 August)
