You mission, if you accept it, is to make a video clip of an artist friend that could be sent to a major television channel so they could do a segment about his album release. Oh by the way, it must be done (as in put on DVD) tonight!
That was the challenge my friend Jon Davis proposed me last night. To make things even harder I had to visit my parents before so I could only be at my place at 8PM which left us with only a few hours to do everything. Finally, to make things worst, I forgot my lightning gear at my parent place.
This basically left me in this situation:
- no decent light
- shoot in my loft (no backdrop or strong light fixtures)
- needed space to put 3 musicians
The situation was dire, but the 5D really was up to the task! I moved the furniture around, put every single lamp in my condo (plus 2 mores from my neighbor) around the musicians trying to put the emphasis on Jon and I hit “record”. As you can see, the result is quite good for such a ghetto setup!
Remember, the goal of this was not to make a music video for the song. It is just a straight clip from the camera, without editing, to give an overview of Jon performance. The tv crew is probably only going to pick a 5-15 seconds segment which is why it was useless to think about editing ourselves.
It took us about 5 takes, spread over 2 hours (we were missing some mic sound adapters) to get to this result. There were a few complains at first by the low angle of the shot but I think it works well. It was shot with my 50mmf/1.4 @f2 ISO2000 (if I remember right). The sound was recording with two external directional mic setup on a Mac pro.
I am very surprised by the quality of the image straight from the camera. If I had more time, I would have done some color correction and added a bit of vignetting to put Jon even more in focus. But we were short on time and very limited in resources.
What I would have done differently (with the same gear & situation):
- increase the distance a bit more between the Jon and the musicians to blur them even more.
- keep the setup even simpler: plug the mics directly in the 5D to save time (no sync, no compress-decompress)
- find a better angle to have an uniform background
The next step is next Sunday when I am going to shoot a few clips of Jon CD launch.
Links:
Jon Davis website (I really have to set him up with a wordpress blog!)
Note
I just realized that the bass is way too strong. Everything sounded perfect on my compute because my sub hoofer is dead. Will have to fix that soon…
My friend Carl Mercier has managed to put have his macbook run with two external monitors! Unfortunately, I do not have the required gear to test how well it works. It seems very convenient if you already have an external monitor and want to keep an eye on an active process, rss feeds, watching a tutorial, etc…
Not directly 5D related but I am sure some of you will find a use for this.
For a limited time, Blasterware fx is offering a free download of 68 high quality sound effects. There is a good variety of sounds in the back so you might want to check it out. Actually, since its free you should get it anyway, you can never have too many sounds effects!
Found out about this on the users group Final Cut Montreal (French).
Link: http://www.blastwavefx.com/i25/Blastwave-FX-Free-Sound-Effects-Download-Pack/information.html
So you got your 5D MarkII and now you want to save some money on lenses. Great, make sure you read this post about the cost/benefits of doing so first. Here is a short list of the best value lenses.
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
If you want to go wide without using a fisheye, this is your only alternative. Very popular for architecture, landscape and street shooters. Be aware that sharpness used to vary a lot in older models so you better get it new.
Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8
At a fraction of the cost of the 24-70 from Canon, this lens is a real bargain for such a good performer. Dont let the low price fool you, this lens offers an exceptional value!
Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8
A bit wider than the Tamron version. Get this one, the 12-24 and a 70-200 and you have everything covered in a set of 3 lenses for (almost) the price of a single L glass. Not bad!
Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8
A very good alternative to the Canon model for half the price. Everything on this lens is on par with its competitor except focussing speed and size. So it should be more interesting for videographers than photographers.
Sigma 20mm f/1.8
Cheapest wide prime lens you can get! I really see a lot of use for this lens for videophotographer.
Tamron AF 90mm f/2.8 Macro
Of all the lenses in this list, this one has to be the biggest underdog. Everyone I know who uses this lens is happy about it. It is a very nice alternative to the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro
I am sure there are other gems hidden out there. I just reviewed the lenses I have personally played with. If you feel that I missed something, feel free to add it to the comments below!
Andrew Howe suggested the Tamron AF 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 XR Di LD VC
I talked about this a while ago but I think it is important to underline this again. If you want to have 24p support in the Canon 5DMrkII, you should go and sign the online petition.
Will it force Canon to bend under the pressure? Probably not. But if we get enough people, it will show manufacturers that there is a market for 24p DSLR and maybe the pressure from other manufacturers will force Canon to act. After all, just imagine the amount of lost 5DMrkII sales if Nikon was to announce a direct contender to the 5D that could shoot at 24p!
All that being said, 24p is not as much an issue for me as the lack of manual control over the exposure settings. How come this issue is not talked about more often? The duct tape solution is not solution!
For the budget conscious photographer looking for new lenses, there is a solution: third party manufacturers.
In fact, it surprises me that we don’t hear about them more often. They offer nice products and when you take into account that they cost half the price of the “official” ones, it is worth investigating.
So let’s see what they are all about.
Things you lose when moving away from Canon
Focus speed
The biggest advantage of Canon lenses over third party ones is not as much the image quality as the Ultrasonic motor (USM). As a generalization, we can state that all Sigma and Tamron lenses are slower to focus than their USM powered counterparts.
How much of a problem is this? It depends. If you are mostly shooting static subject or you are in a controlled environment, you couldn’t care less. On the other hand anything related to sport or wildlife photography requires instant focusing.
In either case, if you are planning to use the lens mostly for cinephotography, it should not be an issue since you will use the manual focus anyway.In this case, just make sure the focusing ring rotation is smooth and fluid.
Internal focusing/zooming
This is one of these things that you don’t notice until it is gone. Basically, it prevent the front of the lens to rotate or moves when you zoom or focus. While this might not seem like a big issue, it is quite important when you are using grad filters. It is a small annoyance when taking pictures, but a big deal when shooting movies. So according to your need you might want to watch this carefully.
Built quality
Canon might charge a premium for its lenses but at least a small part of it is spent toward better quality material. While a plastic enclosure might not have an effect on the quality of the picture, it has a better resistance to shock and scratches. Also, from personal experience I can say that I have never seen a broken metal lens while I have seen countless plastic ones which had a defect of some sort.
While most high end third party lenses have a very good built quality, it is just not as good as the one from Canon. I am thinking here about weather sealing (water and dust). But then again, unless you are planning to drop your lens on the ground, it should not be that much of an issue!
Image quality
Yes, it is true, generally speaking third party lens image quality is lower than the Canon equivalent model. How much lower? It depends. In some case there is not much differences and for others, it is drastic. This is why I created a list of premium third party lens (coming very soon!). While the lenses on this list might not have all the bling and coolness of their Canon counter part, they have identical (or better!) image quality which make them great buys.
If you are going to use the lens for video, lens sharpness is not as important since the resolution of the video is far from the maximum glass resolving power. You should be more interested in how color are rendered, vignetting and contrast.
Things you gain when moving away from Canon
Better warranty
Only god knows why, but Tamron warranty is much better than the one provided by Canon. Typical Tamron warranty lasts 6 years for the pro line, Canon: 1 year, enough said. Having some issues right now with my 100mm f/2.8 Macro
More money in your pocket
3rd party lenses are cheap, how cheap? Most of the time you can get an equivalent lens for about 50% of the Canon version. For the photographer on a budget (who isn’t?) this is incredible, especially if the lens fit the required task. Some would say going third party allow you to save half of your money, I prefer to say that it allows you to have twice as many lenses!
Broader choice of lenses
Since Canon does not cover every focal length, there are some interesting focal gaps that have been exploited by third party manufacturers. The most popular of these being the Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Final verdict
Be careful, there are a lot of sub quality third party lenses available. If you are interested to go that route, you need to make sure that you buy the ones that compare favorably to their Canon counterparts. This is even truer for Canon 5D MRkii users since lens defects are magnified when used with a full frame camera.
Fortunately for our readers, I have already compiled a list of best “best” third party lenses which should be published very soon. Stay tuned and prepare your credit card!
Just a quick warning to anyone thinking about using iPhoto09: if you have a lot of pictures, it is slow! I just came back from by girlfriend parents house where they have about 16,000 pictures (46gig). While iPhoto08 was fast and very responsive, the newer version is as quick slow as a slug given the same amount of pictures/albums.
Just to give some empirical numbers: switching from one section to the next (ex: from faces to an album) took about 3-4 seconds (mac pro 8gigs of ram). This might not seem a lot but when you are trying to put names on all faces, you switch from one album to the next quite often which result in spending most of your time waiting. Not very productive.
Where should we point the finger of blame? Most probably the face recognition feature. I wish there was a way to control how aggressive in its analysis we want it to be, or simply disable it when we are doing picture management.
It is clear to me that the newest iteration of iPhoto was made for casual shooter who have at most 2-3000 pictures. So, what should we expect from Aperture3? It is obvious that such a performance hit would not be tolerated by professionals so I am really curious to see what is going to happen. Maybe Apple will come up with a small update in a few days/week that will fix the issue, but until then I advice you to not use it if you deal with high volume.
Anyone is having the same issues? Or opposite results with the same amount of pictures?
After reading the article How many megapixels are enough at the digital photography school and reading the comments, I felt compelled to make a post about it. After all, as the owner of both a 5DMrkII and this website, I have to have an opinion on the subject!
Why megapixels are important?
When you talk about megapixel count, most people think about maximum print size. While this is true, there is more to it than that, especially since so few people print anymore.
First, the more pixels you have to play with, the more flexibility you have in your cropping choices. For example, it is almost possible to fit a portrait picture taken from the original 5d in a Canon 5DMrkII landscape picture! This very useful when you are not sure about the perfect crop for a shot or simply when you realize that a shot is more interesting with an alternative crop. Or you can even just point the camera in a general direction, take a picture then crop it afterward, paparazzi style.
The next big advantage might be a bit less obvious to most people: post processing treatment. The premise is simple: the more pixel you have in a picture, the smoother curves and gradations can be. It is the same with sharpening. This is why fashion photographers use medium format camera: they want their negatives to be as big as possible so their retoucher could more easily smooth the skin and sharpen the eyes/hair. If you dont trust me, resize one of your picture to 800×1200 and apply the same post processing tasks as you did on the original and see the difference. See? More megapixel is better for post processing!
Finally, when you down sample a picture, it tends to sharpen it, so the bigger the original picture, the sharper it can get when you output it at a lesser size.
Limitations
Camera manufacturers are facing a problem: the lens they are selling are not able to support the high photo-sites count of the newest breed of sensors. Basically, no matter the megapixel count of the sensor, lenses have reached their maximum performance. While it is possible to create higher quality glass, it would not be very practical since only a subset of the market would buy them which would’nt make the operation cost effective.
That is why I think camera manufacturers are going to stop the megapixel race at about the current level and move toward noise management.
Conclusion
While megapixels are important, ISO is also a key factor in picture quality and the debate regarding the importance of ISO vs megapixel count has more to do with shooting style than general guideline. But even then, the 5DMrkII has some very good low light performance so there is not much to worry about…
