After reading Dan post (a while ago) about wide angle lenses  with wide aperture, it got me thinking. While I have been happy with my 17-40L4, as it is wide enough for pretty much everything I do, going wider would open the door for more creative shots. Ex: having an even better separation of foreground and background objects. Also, Dan reviewed lenses from a 1DMrkIV perspective so I wanted to see what was out there for full frame owners.

Before going into the list of available options, I think it is worth looking at the effect of wide aperture on wide lenses. After all, the goal of this exercise is to find a wide angle lens that will give us some control over DoF. As we all know, a wide aperture allows more light into the camera which allow us to shoot in lower light which is always good. The other result of aperture is too control the depth of field (DoF), which is another familiar concept. The thing you might not be aware of is how hard it is to get a shallow DoF when shooting ultra wide.

For most of us, this is a good thing because it allows us to shoot in low light without having to worry about keeping the subject in focus. But what happen when you need to shoot wide and want a shallow DoF? Lets look at some numbers.

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News from BeachTek

First, got this email from BeachTek:

To everyone waiting for the new DXA-5Da XLR adapter for DSLR cameras, they have now shipped ahead of schedule to both B&H and Adorama. The first shipment is in very limited quantities but we are expecting the next, much larger batch to arrive before the end of March.  The new DXA-SLR with built-in preamplifiers and phantom power is still on schedule to be shipped by March 30^th.

next, the MultiMount5D will be available at the end of March for 89$.

Vimeo goes 1080p and HTML5!

You can read about it here. I dont know which one is the most important: 1080p or HTML5… So far, these upgrades wont affect many people/video since most people are not using a HTML5 browser and the clips are rarely uploaded at 1080p resolution.

At least, now you know and you should change your Compressor presets to use the new resolution.

5D Firmware update

A lot of people have been talking about the upcoming firmware update. Planet5D is now talking about a March launch. Guess what? That is what I have been talking about since 2009! The release of the firmware was bound to the Olympics. Canon wants videographers to shoot the events with the 1DMrkkIV and not the 5D (they want people to see pro using the pro bodies). Once the Olympics are over, they will push the new firmware.

Zeiss new HDSLR lenses

I could say a lot of things of why this is big news, but Vincent did it very well already in his post.

Aperture3

I have been using A3 for over a week now. Expect a detailed review by the end of the weekend.

Edit: forgot to add this link to a quick overview of the video feature of A3 by the folks at Still Motion.

New content

I have been working on a few personal projects recently expect to see some of my work soon. Both in stills and motions.

Finally out! It was about time.

I will not list all the new features (over 200), if that is the kind of stuff you like reading about, head over the official Apple page. Instead, I will list the features that mean the most for us.

First, facial recognition. I already talked about it in my Aperture 3 prediction about 8 months ago. This is a big thing if you are often shooting the same people. I am just worried about how long it is going to take to pass over my 192 gigs of pictures…

Next on the line is Places. Another feature that most travel photographers will love. I know because I had to geotag over 2000 pictures when I came back from Vietnam. Not a fun experience! At the local scale, it is also going to be useful to organize pictures when doing on a location scouting day. I used to import them in iPhoto just for that and it was a real pain.

Video import and playback directly in Aperture! I love this one for two reasons: first because it is going to be useful to do everything in a single operation and also  because it shows how Apple recognize HDSLR as a trend and not a novelty. As soon as I finish the download, I will see if it if possible to batch process video files automatically for conversion to ProRes.

Slideshows. I never used these in Aperture. I preferred working within either Lightroom, Animoto or Motion. But, with the new slideshows, I just have one thing to say: wow! I am impressed. 95% of the work I used to do in Motion is doable in Aperture and it looks even easier!

Finally, Brushes. It was about time Aperture got these! None destructive editing at the pixel level has been the reason why I moved to Lightroom (ok, also because it was faster!). I am glad the feature is now in Aperture since it saves a round trip to Photoshop for 95% of the image corrections.

While waiting for my review, you can read what Chase has to say about it. He was on the beta list so he probably knows more than me!

Note: You can upgrade to Aperture 3 from the Academic version of Aperture 2!

Note2: I havent found an electronic version for the full product, so I had to place an order and download the demo.

Now that Final Cut Studio 3 is out, lets talk (and guess) about what we will find in the upcoming Aperture update.

I have been an Aperture user since day 1. In version 1, is was revolutionary but slow. V1.5 brought a nice speed boost and V2 introduced a few new tools and the plugin architecture. So what should we expect for v3?

First, meta tagging has to be improved as I talk about it a while ago. I am so frustrated about the tagging system that I am not tagging as much as I used to, which is a bad thing since it is one of the reasons why I picked Aperture instead of Lightroom in the first place… In fact, improvements to the tagging functionality has been so slow that I expect it to be one of the focal point of v3 with the release of automatic tagging of pictures which was started in the latest iPhoto update.

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I dont know if you tag, but I do. I try to do it a lot and sometimes it makes me think that the guys at Apple dont use the tagging interface at all…

• First, as I said in the past, when you open the Keyword HUD, the cursor should be in the search field. And the current content should be pre-selected.
• The search algorithm should not just look for keywords starting with the search term but for those that contain the search term, where ever it is placed. It is “like ‘%criteria_term%’” and not just ”like ‘criteria_term%’”. Small difference but a lot of frustration.
• There should be some built in intelligence which recognizes when you have two similar tags in different categories and pops a warning.
• We need a feature to point the tags that are not used so we can do some cleanup.
• Is it too much to ask to have a tag cloud when we create keyword based smart albums? Please.
• Talking about smart albums, I would like to be able to have all pictures with tags X but NOT tag Y.

I think it is enough, for now… I dont know if you have guessed but I just completed a 2 hours tagging marathon. I was lagging behind in my tagging for a while and tonight I had to pay the price of my procrastination!

No, this is not a review of iLife ‘09, or iPhoto. There are already plenty out there. 

Instead I want you, me, us, to think about how that face detection thing can change the way we work. I played with it a bit and while it is not perfect (according to iPhoto my girl friend looks like a guy as soon as she wears a hat…) it shows promises and it is a first step in the automated meta-tagging world. 

As a photographer, I tag all my pictures with at least 3-4 tags: the location, the subject, the dominant color (if any) and the activity (if any). This is a tedious and time wasting process that is probably going to go away in a few years. Lets see how.

Location

Probably the easiest tag to apply to a picture is its location, even more so when it is linked to a GPS coordinate. The possible level of detail here is incredible, once the system knows the approximate location, it can check in the address book if its close to one of your relative house, the internet for a store or important land mark, etc…

Subject

While not perfect, iPhoto face detection works well enough to allow us to see that it is not a gimmick and that more development is going to be done in this field. Imagine if it could recognize pets, houses, bird species… A lot of metadata could be automatically guessed and submitted to the photographer for approval. This would be a big time saver and I am half expecting Aperture 3 (or 4?) to have this feature.

By the way, I did some serious testing to see if iPhoto could recognize cats face and it does not. If is limited to humans… 

Dominant color

If you ever had to create a picture book, you know how useful it is to have all your pictures classified by main color. Again, this is not a new technology, stock photo sites have been using this for years.

Activity

By activity I mean: travel, sports, cooking, etc.. I dont think we will see this kind of automatic meta-tagging soon, but there are ways to make the job easier for us. For example, if from one picture to the next the background and location is the same, the system could suggest the same location as the previous pictures.

Conclusion

This is just the beginning. Automatic meta-tagging is coming and anyone who ever had to tag pictures after a long weekend shooting should be happy.

Aperture team, are you reading?

Hudson, from the cinema5D forum made an interesting discovery while reading the Canon 5DMrkII white paper (yep, some people really read these things). Look at page 14 the in the middle of the page you will see this:

If you read the whole thread you will see that they have tried to contact Canon to have some explanations. Canon reply was quite sketchy and would probably not hold very long in court.

Hence the rumors of class action for false advertisement. It seems like some people dont understand the meaning of the word control. Going this route would probably be the easiest way for Canon 5DMrkII owners to get a firmware update that would allow real manual control.

In case you are reading this Canon, control means that I could pick the ISO, aperture and Shutter speed that we want. Actually, if you give us aperture and ISO we can live without the shutter speed.

So now is time for action guys! If you live in the US contact one of these ambulance chaser lawyer, if you are from the rest of the world (Google Analytics tells me that you are 65% of my visitors) click on the Digg link to bring more people to the cause or join the cinema5D forum and sign the petition.

DISCLAIMER: these parameters were not discovered by me, I found them somewhere on the net and never wrote the URL. I will update the post if I ever find the URL again and give due credits.

Here is a quick tip on how to achieve a cross process look in Aperture without buying an expensive plugin (I am looking at your Silver Fx!).

What is cross processing? Because a picture is worth a thousand word, here are the before and after images.

Neat hein?

The result is very easy to achieve in Aperture. To do so, in the Level panel,

• select the Red channel and set the 3 values (B,G,W) to : 0,21, 0,53 and 0,92
• select the Green channel and set the 3 values (B,G,W) to : 0, 0,42 and 1
• select the Blue channel and set the 3 values (B,G,W) to : 0, 0,44 and 0,94

You can then save this as a preset for later use by clicking on the little gear on the top right of the panel and clicking on save.

Now, just dont over use this technique because it can grow old very quickly, like over cooked HDR… Oh and it tends to destroy skin color too so be careful!