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Admin LoginAs I mentioned earlier, today I received a new lens, the Canon EF 135mm f/2L.
I took a few photos tonight after work and must say I’m happy. Here’s a couple of typical foamer shots… first I caught a westbound manifest coming up to the Wintler crossing:
Finally, Amtrak train 507 approaching the B yard in Vancouver:
My new Canon 135mm F2L just arrived…
About a year ago a few friends and I began serious discussing insuring our gear. I don’t have nearly as much equipment as many pros, but between my camera, lenses, and assorted accessories, the equipment would cost several thousand dollars to replace.
I looked at a few options and ended up getting a personal article policy through State Farm. It turns out the insurance was quite affordable. I was able to cover all of my gear against theft, loss, and damage for around $45 a year.
$45 a year. That’s less than I spend on gas for a weekend railfan trip. The policy essentially covers anything that could happen, from a bag being swiped at an airport, to me just being clumsy and dropping my 300mm off a cliff in the gorge. I quickly signed up for the policy. I figure at that rate, if I have just one expensive piece of equipment damaged in 20 years, the policy will have more than paid for itself.
I recently saw a blog post about a program called NikSecure which starts at $150/year for coverage for Nikon equipment. It’s more expensive than my State Farm policy, but it’s an option.
A photographer’s gotta do what a photographer’s gotta do, and if that means taking pictures of a bird in flight while waiting for the train, so be it.
All praise fast L glass with IS…
You can say what you want, but I’ll have to point out to Jennifer that I’m not yet to this state…
As expected, Canon has announced the 30D and some new lenses.
Under the things-I-want department:
Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF-S 17 - 55 mm F2.8 IS lens
Canon EF 85 mm F1.2 L II lens
Back in the reality department, I might eventually own a 30D, but my next lens purchase is still going to be the EOS 135mm f/2.0L
As a relatively new (and happy) iMatch user, I was excited yesterday to recieve e-mail about the release of iMatch 3.5 which is a long-awaited upgrade featuring many new features (and some bug fixes).
Take a look at the Photools homepage or go straight to the iMatch 3.5 Release Notes.
Lately I’ve had a couple people ask about what gear I use so I figured I’d post something that I can point to.
My camera body is a Canon EOS-300D also known as the Digital Rebel. It’s a 6.3 megapixel DSLR. I got this body in December 2003 and have been quite happy with the results. There’s newer, better bodies out there, but I’ll be honest I only have one complaint with the 300D, and that is that I wished it had a bit bigger buffer… the buffer will only hold 4 RAW images. I have the battery grip BG-E1 which I value more for the vertical controls than I do for the second battery compartment.
I pretty much always shoot in RAW mode. Sure, the files are bigger and require more post-processing, but RAW gives me the flexibility to make color and white-balance adjustments that I don’t always want to trust to the camera in the field. If you’re attending GorgeRail, Paul Petersen will be doing a workshop on digital image processing, and he’s a great source of knowledge for everything you ever wanted to know about RAW.
I carry around a few lenses and am looking to add a few more.
When I bought the camera I got the “kit” with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom. I’ve been satisfied with this lens; it’s definitely worth the $100 which it cost me. It’s not the fastest lens in the world but it’s very light and the optics are pretty good. It’s a decent lens for roster shots.
My main everyday walkaround lens is the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom. It runs around $425 and is a great value. I find it to occasionally be a bit soft but not very often, and not enough that I’m gonna chuck this and replace it with primes (well, at least not yet). The IS is great for hand-holding. I use this lens for almost all of my around-town roster shots and close-ups. About the only time I use the 18-55 is if I need to go wider than the 28mm on this lens.
I also have the EF 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, which is a bargain with a street price around $70. This is an entry-level lens, without USM focusing, but the speed is great for low-light situations and the price can’t be beat. Specifically related to railfanning, if I need to do a low-light roster shot I’ll throw on this lens.
My newest lens is the EF 135mm f/2L prime. I wanted something fast around this focal length. I have been quite happy with this lens, which works nicely with the Canon 1.4 extender to give me a f/2.8 prime around 190mm.
My big lens is a EF 300mm f/4L IS prime, which is excellent for long telephoto shots. This lens is tack-sharp. It can be handheld with the IS although I usually use it on my monopod which works out well. My only complaint is that shooting head-on telephoto shots in low light often causes the autofocus to hunt due to the locmotive headlights. Pre-focusing is your friend.
I carry everything around in a LowePro Mini Trekker AW which is a backpack-style bag which has ample space for two bodies and several lenses. It has several pouches inside as well as a couple outside zippered pockets. The “AW” in the name stands for All-Weather, which is because of the built-in fold-away nylon cover which covers up the whole thing if needed. Given the downpours we can have up in this area, the rain cover is a nice feature.
I have a Bogen 681B monopod with a 3229 tilt/swivel head. This is a sturdy monopod which I use almost all the time except for quick grab shots. I also have a cheap Vivitar tripod that I use for night shots. When using the tripod I’ll usually use a remote shutter release.
That’s the majority of what I carry around all the time to take pictures. The few other random things in my camera bag aren’t of much interest (lens cleaning supplies, a washcloth to dry off lenses, and some sporks).
Nikon announced last week their almost-abandonment of the film camera market.
Today, Konica-Minolta went one step further: they’re quitting the photo business entirely.
Mario, the guy who writes the iMatch photo management software, has posted the release notes for the soon-to-be-posted and eagerly-awaited update. This isn’t a boring service pack, but a major update addressing some of the most-wanted feature requests and changes.
I’m excited. Go read the notes yourself here.
Today Nikon announced it’s discontinuing almost all non-digital equipment, including film SLRs, most large/medium format equipment, most manual lenses, and related accessories.
http://www.nikon.co.uk/press_room/releases/show.aspx?rid=201
When Jennifer finds a charge to iMatch on our credit card statement, hopefully she doesn’t think I joined some computer dating service. Despite the name which to me sounds like a dating service or Apple’s latest entry in their iLife suite, I’ve found iMatch to be a quite capable photo management and organization solution on my Windows PC.
A couple months ago, I reached a frustration point with Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0, which I’ve used for cataloging my photos for the past couple years. The program was just getting slower and slower. I only had around 2,500 images in the system… it needed to scale. The Fisher-Price-esque GUI had always bothered me, and I found it slightly disappointing that the only way to add metadata to the photos for later filtering and searching was through the use of categories. The fact that Photoshop Album limited me to how many levels of categories I could have had also been a sticky point.
A few weeks ago I started searching to find a better management program. I looked at a few online, downloaded a couple demos, and considered the very steep price (hundreds of dollars) for some of the software packages. I decided the one I was going to give a full workout was iMatch. I started by working on my category taxonomy, figuring out how I was going to want to search. When I setup my Photoshop Album categories I was working purely on guesswork. Now I was able to set the categories up based on my real-world experiences of the past couple years.
After setting up the categories I started out by importing one DVD (about 4.5GB) of photos and I went about adding them to the appropriate categories. I also set up a custom image property called RoadNumber to note the lead locomotive in the railroad shots. Later on, I can go back and search and see if I have photos of a certain unit. Overall the tagging into categories I think went just a tad faster than with Photoshop Album, probably due to the less-graphical interface which let me get to more categories faster. iMatch also includes the ability to set up “Category Splashers” which are shortcuts that assign a set of categories to a group of images in one action. These can be placed on a shortcut toolbar or assigned keyboard shortcuts.
The geeky side of me likes the ability to create any sort of custom properties for the images in my collection, and then being able to filter or sort on those properties using regular expressions.
iMatch handles all common image formats as well as the RAW image formats from major manufacturers. It manages images on removable media (CD/DVD, etc) by using the disc’s internal serial number so that a large library of offline storage can be managed with ease.
Overall I have found that I can get my images into iMatch faster than with Photoshop Album, and that iMatch should scale well to my growing database of photos. The ability to perform detailed, flexible queries far exceeds the limited point-and-click, AND-only query abilities of Photoshop Album. Is the improved speed, flexible keyword organization, and scalability enough to make me recatalog all of my existing collection? Given that Photoshop Album is a dead product, I just plunked down the $60 to purchase iMatch from Photools.com.
I got home last night, took my 512mb compact flash card out of my EOS-300D and put it on our kitchen counter while I moved a few things around. In the process of moving Brooklyn’s sippy cup, I managed to knock the memory card off the counter, and it landed directly into a dog’s water dish.
Shit.
I got the card out of the water in about 2 or 3 seconds. I shook it several times to get drops to stop coming out, then placed it in the office which tends to be the warmest room in our house.
Tonight I took the card, popped it into my reader and was able to copy all of the images off of the card, and I’m able to open them in Photoshop.
Whew.
In case anyone cares, here’s what I typically have with me when out railfanning for the day:
The monitor on my main PC at home (the one I use for photo editing) is dying, and in the process of dying it’s botching the colors and contrast. Photos which I edit and look great at home look like crap when viewed on a correctly-functioning monitor. As a result, you’ll likely see a few less photos posted here for a week or two until I can come up with a better monitor at home.
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