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I’ve just upgraded the hard drive in my primary computer. It’s now got a 2 terabyte 3.5″ drive.
The first computer I used had a 5.25″ floppy drive that stored a princely 143K. Now I’ve got a drive with 2 147 483 648 kilobyte capacity.
Crazy.
Interesting concept. I know I’ve wanted for a long time to have a little pocketable camera that offered the sort of image quality you expect from a DSLR. I’m not sure if trying to capitalize on the reputation of the old Olympus PEN cameras makes much sense, as I don’t know how many people really remember those today. But it’s kind of cool to see Olympus doing something nobody else is doing.
Hello! For my upcoming book I’m looking for a broken Canon Speedlite and lens. I’d prefer them to be broken since I intend to dismantle them and photograph their gory insides, but if you feel like generously contributing a working one, that’d be fine too.
The details: I need a Speedlite with a zoom motor mechanism, such as any EZ or 400 series EX or 500 series EX. As for the lens, I need one with a distance encoder, so most ring USM lenses would work. Or most recent lenses, including EF-S lenses.
Thanks!
Canon are going to release a free firmware update in June to allow for more manual control over the 5D mark II’s video output, which is pretty remarkable. Shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Quite unusual for Canon to release an update to a product with a significant feature enhancement. Very cool.
Overall I’m quite liking my 5D mark II, though I haven’t been using it very long, and I’ve been too busy with the new book to do much more than product shots with it. I’ll be using it on trips to Greece and Ireland shortly, so I’ll be giving it a bit of a workout. Generally I’m quite happy. Low light looks good, rez is good. LiveView is very handy. Though the battery change is very frustrating (I have a pile of BP-511s and will now have to travel with two chargers) and the patterned noise in shadow areas is worse than I’d like.
Another 5D mark II produced work, this by Tom of Timescapes.org
Brilliant stuff, especially the driving scenes and the pan/track scenes. Incredible to think that people were doing stuff like this in the 80s and 90s (films like Baraka) on massive budgets with 70mm film cameras. Today it’s within the reach of any dedicated hobbyist or small company.
I was tempted to use the line “Set your controls for the heart of the sun”, but a British newspaper has already done that.
But here’s a link to an amazing photograph which has been zipping around the world for the past few days.
http://www.skynyx.fr/legault/atlantis_hst_transit.html
It was taken by amateur French astrophotographer Thierry Legault, using a Canon EOS 5D mark II with Baader solar filters over his telescope. Despite some of the bogus news reports out there, which presumably hire chimpanzees for fact checkers, he did not take the photo from his back garden in France - he flew to Florida specifically to take the shot, since that’s where the proper lining up of things would occur.
For those interested in this new little flashlet from Canon.
http://photonotes.org/reviews/speedlite-270ex/
Basically it’s a nice upgrade from the 220EX for the most part. It has extensive digital control, and a tiltable flash head.
However, its lack of TTL, red AF assist lights and external controls do limit its general utility to a certain market.
Couple of new products from Canon: a new consumer model (Rebel T1i in the US) with many of the features of the EOS 50D, including HD video, and a new low-end flash unit.
The 270EX is sort of a funny one - it’s like a resurrected Speedlite 300EZ from the days of yore. It adds E-TTL metering and the ability to tilt upwards but takes away flash head zooming (you can manually zoom to one of two positions), a test light, and an autofocus assist light. It’s this last which is a bit annoying. Instead of a red LED you get the nice stuttering blasts of light from the main tube.
It doesn’t have wireless capabilities. Interestingly, it has control over manual output, but the goofy thing is there are no manual controls on the device itself - manual output works only with those EOS cameras which support Speedlite control via the menu system.
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/03/building-better-mousetrap.html
Cute little deermouse, too.
A couple of interesting bits of news in the world of photography.
First, PocketWizard have taken the wraps off a very interesting new pair of products which enable wireless E-TTL over the radio waves. Unlike their previous sync-only products, the new ControlTL products let you do automated metering - at least on Canon EOS cameras. Nikon users will have to wait a little longer for an equivalent Nikon-compatible product.
Pretty cool stuff. But what makes this one particularly interesting is that they’ve come up with an ingenious engineering hack they’re calling HyperSync, which enables high speed sync at much higher shutter speeds than you could otherwise. This trick is done by letting the user adjust the flash so that it fires before the shutter normally opens, thus taking advantage of the decay tail of a flash burst. Very clever.
For now the new products are US/Canada-only, though I’m sure they’ll be releasing international versions soon.
Second, Canon have introduced a pair of new tilt-shift lenses to their stable. They’ve replaced the 24mm tilt/shift lens with a new mark II. And they’ve also introduced a crazy-expensive 17mm f/4L tilt-shift.
Like the Hartblei tilt/shift lenses the new Canon lenses let you combine tilt and shift movements, which provides for quite a bit of flexibility. Fascinating, if limited in market if only because of the cost.
