Source:  Digital Photography Review

The lines have blurred between high-end digital photography and Full HD video.  One of the first DSLR camera manufacturers to go into Full HD video was Nikon.  Now it’s Canon’s turn. With the release of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II there is a lot of pressure for every other camera manufacturer to follow suit.

An interesting sidelight of this development is that traditional digital video cameras have been based on the mini-DV format.  One limitation of the mini-DV cameras was that not all the pro model cameras had interchangeable lenses.  Except for Canon.  The top-end Canon pro model mini-DV video camera had an adapter which allows EOS lenses to be fitted to the video camera.  This extended the quality of the video beyond the standard camera lens.

With Nikon leading the way with the release of a full HD video capable camera, Canon is trying to catch up. This is an evolutionary step for DSLR cameras.  Capable of capturing at 1920×1080, it can save the file to Quicktime MOV format.  At 30fps and 1080p HD, it can store up to 12 mins of video.  Maximum file size is 4GB.  More than enough for saving and editing purposes.

One thing missing from the EOS 5D Mark II is a built-in flash.  Though it has the necessary software for controlling flash and white balance compensation for the use of flash.  And it has a relatively low 3.9fps burst mode.

By all means this is not a shabby camera.  This may not be Canon’s top of the line, but it definitely ranks higher than other camera manufacturer’s top of the line model. It’s important to note the direction these two camera makers are going.  The hefty $2,700 price tag (body only) is relatively  cheap considering that it is a full-featured HD video camera.  Now if only CompactFlash disks were able to catch up with faster and larger capacity flash drives then this would be a well-defined niche with the other major players coming in with their own full-HD video DSLR camera models.

Official Website:  Canon Press Release

My son is now in college and since he was a kid, I never saw him have any interest in photography.  My daughter is a different story though.  She’s got a good technical grasp of the camera and taking pictures.

But lately, it’s been my son who’s doing some catch up with the camera.  And I guess he’s got a better eye than me.   I have refrained from teaching him photography, specifically how to take pictures and composition because I’d much rather he develop his own style before I mess it with whatever concepts I have.

Now that he’s a freshman in Fine Arts, he’s takent he camera and he’s been experimenting with it.  I am still holding back on teaching him the technicals (topics such as aperture, light, film speed, flash, etc.).  He’s learning on his own.

One thing he’s been experimenting on is the use of the macro lens, as well as worm’s eye view composition.  The macro lens allows a shorter focal point, and you can get very close to the subject and still have it focused properly.  Macro photography requires a different eye for detail, seeing mundane and small things and composing the shot as if it was a regular-sized object. Using a zoom and a macro shows a lot of detail for the shot, very up close and personal.  We are talking of subjects as small as ants.  Personally, I feel limited by the available subjects.  But then again, I’m not a nature photography kind of guy who would like to go on a photo safari in the backyard.

He’s also taken to shooting from the ground.  On a recent trip to a rural community, his class visited a church and they took some pictures.  He lay prone on the church’s aisle to take a shot of the altar framed by the pews.  Too bad the shots had people walking on the aisle.  It would have been better if the church was empty when they visited.  He’s taken his style to more common subjects like his sister.  The resulting picture of her sitting on the floor and reading a book looked like a very tight shot with the subject – his sister – the focus on the picture’s vanishing point.

Me?  I’m still studying new things, like panoramic shots and stitching.

This is for all the camwhores out there.  Pardon my french, but the most common camera pose nowadays sucks.  Yes, the most common camera shot is with a camera held at arm’s length and pointing at oneself.  I say it sucks because there is no possibility of composing and expanding the picture.

No offense meant to anyone who’s done that before.  I know I have.  On my wedding day, even.  And that was with a film camera.  But really, there’s only that very close shot and if you’re lucky, you occupy the whole picture.  If you’re unlucky, it might show an ear.  But considering that the digital camera might have a wide-focus lens, the ear only shot is a very slim possibility.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t like the shot.  I actually hate it.  First off, because in all probability, the lens is wide angle, the resulting picture would be distorted.  The face would be a bit fatter, and the nose wider.  As an aside, this is also what happens when you have an ID picture shot at an arcade booth.  I will not go into the psychological study of people who have no better things to do than take pictures of themselves.  To them I say, knock yourself out.

I would much rather use a tripod.  Or at least a camera’s timer.  If there’s no tripod available, you can always set the camera down somewhere and hope it doesn’t fall and take a shot at the sky.  Now if I only had a camera remote control, I would not have ran uphill those several times I went to some hill top spots.

Tripods are cheap.  At least these are much cheaper than the camera.  Come to think of it, I have two cameras of my own, and two tripods.  One camera and tripod set was bought twenty years ago.  I don’t use the camera as often as before, but the old tripod still gets a lot of use.  And I expect to be using it for a much longer time than my film-based camera.

And yes, I bought the tripod so I won’t have to take a picture of myself at arm’s length.

There is however, one exception to the camwhore-camera-held-at-arm’s-length-sucks picture. If a celebrity on the red-carpet was bantering with fans and shot the photo at arm’s length to show him and the fans, then that is way cool!

Digital cameras nowadays are feeling the pinch of available storage media.  The numbers are large:  a 5MP JPEG picture shot with a Kodak could be 700KB in size; a 7MP JPEG picture captured with a Sony could be as large as 2.5MB; a 15MP JPEG shot with a Canon EOS could be as large as 7MB.

Unlike hard disks which have seen falling prices as they push towards the single hard disk terabyte capacity, flash memory used by cameras and other small electronic devices are still expensive when you consider the cost/MB.  Another problem with flash memory is the write speed of larger capacity drives.  And the larger the capacity, the slower the flash drive write speed.

That expectation has changed though with the release of the SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash Series 32GB flash drive.  This drive also boasts of a 50% speed increase (which means that the write cycle time is half that of current flash disks of the same capacity).

As a backgrounder, flash drives have no moving part. This makes it more robust than hard disks, which are based on a spinning disk and a read/write head on an arm. One reason, however, why flash drives are slower is because of the software which evens out the writing among the drive sectors.  This mean that as the flash drive is used, all the sectors have approximately the same number of accrued write cycles.  The software on the drive keeps track of the number of times a sector has been written to.  It decides which sector to use based on a least-used algorithm.  A side-effect of this is that when a flash drive starts having bad sectors (after a sector has been written to more than 100,000 times), all the other sectors will go bad very quickly afterwards.

The SanDisk announcement is very significant for camera makers and, to a lesser extent, to computer manufacturers.  The larger capacity flash drives can containg more and larger files of the large megapixel variety.  Additionally, the cameras can now cycle faster and be ready to shoot in a shorter time.  This also paves the way for longer use by video cameras.  This is specially true for HD cameras which use flash drives.

For now, SanDisk has the niche all to itself.  They invented the flash memory, and they are deserving of leaving the competition far behind.

This is one trick I learned while I was still using film cameras.  Digital cameras are now a lot more common than film cameras, but I still use technique to tweak my pictures.  I’m actually surprised that a lot of digital photographers who use computers to enhance their pictures don’t know this.

The problem stems more from the white balance of a camera.  For most users this is set to auto mode.  And this results in pictures with funky colors, this fault is specially evident with skin tones.  The solution is to adjust levels using an image editor.  In most instances this would be Adobe Photoshop.  I use an open source software called GIMP which comes with Ubuntu Linux.  Either way, the method is the same.

After loading the picture in the image editor, go to “Levels.”  On Photoshop, it’s under the Image menu.  On GIMP, it under “Colors.” Among other things, the levels dialog box shows a graph of the gradation of color.  Say for instance, for red, the graph would show the amount or volume for a tint of red, from darkest red to lightest. On the Levels dialog box, there’s a drop-down menu for Channel (for “All”, red, green and blue).  For each of these values, you move the left and right slider so that the these sliders are at the edge of the graph.  This means that for the left slider, no graph values remain on the left.  And for the right-hand slider, it is at the right side limit of the graph.  Much like book-ends.  Repeat this for the red, green and blue values.

The resulting picture is more vivid and with better contrast than the original.  However, this is not needed for all cameras.  Some cameras have built-in levels which is computed while you compose the shot.  In most instances, there’s very little gain from this exercise.  Most specially for pictures with levels encompassing the whole spectrum.  Or if the camera white balance was set correctly.

Still, I take a look at the levels every time I load up a picture for enhancement or editing on Photoshop or GIMP.  Force of habit, I guess.

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