I had the opportunity to play with a old Zeiss lens last Tuesday. I only had the lens for a day (actually, a night) and did not have much time to do serious testing so I decided to skip the standard and boring sharpness assessments and move to a topics you will find more interesting: how it performs for video.

About the results: the Zeiss lens is an old model and the newer version should perform significantly better. The reason I was interested in this old lens is that a lot of people are using old Nikon and Zeiss lens to shoot video instead of using original Canon products. Some people do it because they prefer the look produced by these models or simply because they bought them before the release of the 1.1 firmware and stuck with them. Of course, these older model are also significantly cheaper! Read the rest of this entry »

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?

One of the most frequent question asked by people trying to gear up for cinemaphotography is which lens they should buy, and most specificaly if they should get a lens with IS (VR for Nikonians) or not.

While this question as been answered many times when SLR were only able to shoot pictures, few people have looked into it from a cinemaphotography perspective.

So here it is! My totally unscientific side by side comparison between IS and non IS at two focal length. I do not have a 24-105ISf4 so I had to use the only IS lens in my bag, the 70-200LISf/4. I did two simple test: one at 70mm ELF and another at 200mmELF (coming soon, need editing!).

Disclaimer: My hands are not steady at all, this is why I always carry a tripod around! And to make things worst, I took these clips after working out. This is a worst case scenario test, I was holding the camera without any support but my elbows pressed against my body.

Image stabilization and the 5DMrkII @70mm

Image stabilization and the 5DMrkII @200mm

As a bonus, I have done some post processing in the last segment of the clip to show how much more improvement can be done by applying a software based IS filter. In this case, I used the one from Final Cut Pro.

I guess it is clear how much the IS contributes to the overall quality of the clip. I would love to have somebody do the same test at an EFL of 24mm to see how much of a difference it makes. In fact, I am thinking about getting rid of the 24-70 for a 24-105, a move I would have never dared to think of a few months ago!

Note: sorry for the 200mm video being in low def, seems like I cant be a pro user of Vimeo since I am not USians…