Messages

1

HDR - High Dynamic Range / Re: Post your HDR images:

« on: May 17, 2013, 05:01:52 PM »

How's this - it's a stack of 12 frames, 3 exposures at each of 4 focus points



Need to find some more interesting subject matter for this technique

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Lenses / Re: A review of the Samyang Tilt Shift

« on: May 01, 2013, 07:29:44 PM »

I'm more concerned about distortion than outright resolution given the insane amount the 14mm had. Thankfully they report 2.5% barrel which is not great, but not too bad either. The Canon mk2 was under 1% barrel as measured by photozone though.

I think it's unreasonable to expect a 14mm to have distortion in line with a 24mm - they are very different lenses. I like my 14mm (though admittedly don't use it often) because it's sharp and the distortion can be pretty well corrected.

However with a tilt shift the distortion is uncorrectable, but i'd mostly want it for landscape use so 2.5% is acceptable if the resolution is there.

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Lenses / A review of the Samyang Tilt Shift

« on: April 30, 2013, 03:20:55 PM »

Finally good to see one of these in the field (even if it is the Nikon mount)

http://www.ephotozine.com/article/samyang-t-s-24mm-f-3-5-ed-as-umc-lens-review-21853

Hopefully there will be some Canon reviews up soon, but I expect the results will be very similar.

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Landscape / Re: Post Your National Park Photos

« on: March 05, 2013, 03:34:31 PM »

I'd love to see your national park landscape photos. Post them here! I'll post a few more later, but I want to see yours!

Took this a few months ago in Olympia National Park



Got a lot of landscapes here, but I was surprised how few of them are actually in national parks

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Third Party Manufacturers / Re: Rokinon 14mm f/2.8

« on: November 09, 2012, 12:45:07 PM »

Wow...absolutely beautiful!!

Might I ask your camera settings for those images?

Thank you!

The Northern Lights shot was a 13s exposure at ISO 10,000
The Milky Way shot was a 30s exposure at ISO 16,000

Both were shot on a 5D Mk3, and were probably at either f/2.8 or f/4. Unfortunately I'm lazy about taking notes these days

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Third Party Manufacturers / Re: Rokinon 14mm f/2.8

« on: November 08, 2012, 06:31:23 PM »

I use this lens quite a bit at night.

It's easy to focus at infinity since it's hyperfocal at something like 8'. Just focus it roughly there and it's tack sharp at infinity.

Here are a couple of samples.  Both use a lightroom lens profile to remove the mustache distortion, the first one also has some perspective correction applied.

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Lenses / Re: What can tilt-shift lenses do that post-production cannot?

« on: May 11, 2012, 04:23:58 PM »

I'd love one but i'm holding off waiting to see how the samyang 24mm ts looks. I'm very happy with their 14mm lens, and a good tiltshift should be within their skillset.

8

EOS Bodies / Re: More Full Frame Cameras on the 2012 Horizon? [CR2/CR1]

« on: May 03, 2012, 04:28:23 PM »

I will definitely buy a 5Dmk2 (With the same specs, IQ and performance) but with 7D AF system.... i believe $2500 will be a fair price..... And for extra $1000 (5Dmk3) you will get better AF, faster shooting and better low light performance. sounds very plausible for a budget FF camera; don;t mention that canon have to change only the AF system ... not to redesign a new body to compete with nikon budget FF (if will be one).

I find it very hard to believe that the 5D2 will be a long term solution. It makes no sense for Canon to manufacture both a 21 and 22MP FF sensor. I suspect they'll discontinue the 5d2 in favor of an entry level version of the 5d3.

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EOS Bodies / Re: The Techradar Test of the 5D MK3

« on: April 25, 2012, 11:24:41 PM »

I'm curious why people aren't more intrigued by this review seeing as it doesn't exactly put the DxO test on it's ear, but it certainly shows that in RAW (with TIFF conversion) the results are rather different.

There's an interesting comment from them at the bottom of the page.

The version of the DXO software they have isn't able to read Canon raws from the 5d3 so they convert both to TIFF using the manufacturers' software and analyze that. It's definitely interesting that this is yielding a different result from dxo's own tests - although I'm not really sure what to make of it

10

EOS Bodies / Re: Shoot JPEG again with 5D3

« on: April 25, 2012, 10:41:18 PM »

I actually shot jpeg today for the first time in 4 or 5 years. Was covering a team building event for my employer and they needed the photos for a presentation later that day. Ran it in raw + small jpeg and the results were very good (though standards were pretty low too)

11

EOS Bodies / Re: I still don't get the crop debate

« on: April 12, 2012, 04:01:50 PM »

I did some back of the envelope math...and I'm not buying the cost of sensor reasoning.

If Canon is using a 300mm wafer, they will get roughly 80 sensor dies at full frame and 215 sensors at APC-C.  (Don't shoot me here, I didn't account for edges, targets, etc.  I just divided the area of the wafer by the sensor area).  If yields drop for the FF (yields decline more for larger die) and the yield works out to even 4 to 1, then you get about 50 FF and 200 Crop sensors per wafer.  If you account for pixel density I would expect the yields to even out (smaller feature sizes would see lower yields).  So I think I am being somewhat biased in favor of crops here.

I'm not sure that smaller feature sizes are likely to really reduce the yield that much, i suspect fixed defects on the wafer are more likely and i think your yield calculations sound reasonable (though it's anyone's guess how many of those defects really exist).

I suspect the features on the 5D3 and 7D sensors will probably be quite similarly sized. Just because the photosites are larger doesn't mean you can afford to make the other circuitry larger.

It depends more on economies of scale than anything else, I suspect Canon can probably sell 10x the number of crop sensors so that drives their price down more. It'll be interesting to see if they make a low MP full frame rebel. I've always wondered how many potential 5d sensors are rejected just because they have too many photosite defects. Perhaps with some clever mapping and downsampling they could be reworked to make a rebel sensor

12

EOS Bodies / Re: Adorama Mark Wallace Product Review Of The 5D III.

« on: April 05, 2012, 12:07:28 PM »

I really like the fact that Wallace is not bringing up one single word that would state a biased comparison against a specific camera from some other brand. I think both cameras/brands have their place (yes slap me if you want) but I'm only interested to see what the 5DIII delivers. Of course, it's only my opinion... I don't know if he's brand-fanatic or not but I could imagine him as well talking about the good things that's delivered by the other brand. I guess that's kind of professional.

Obviously he's working for Adorama here and it's not in their interests to have him pick and choose brands. Still I've always got the feeling that he's more of a Nikon guy, thought I can't really remember where I got that from.

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EOS Bodies / Re: Thoughts of Gizmodo today - pretty balanced

« on: April 04, 2012, 10:24:07 AM »

I certainly had no intention of criticising the guy - his work is great, and however he produces it is certainly none of my business. I was simply highlighting that 250,000 images a year is a heck of a lot to be archiving, which is what he implies by his 'non-starter' comment, and that if each of these images is valued enough to archive, he should not be whining about the 20 terabytes that it takes for 250k 36MP images vs the 10-15 terabytes it would take for 250k @ 22mp. That's just silly, frankly, given that you can get a terabyte for less than £100 these days.

I suppose I find it hard to believe that 12TB is doable but 20TB is not. Granted by the time you have redundant hard disks and offsite backups it becomes more expensive than just buying the drive, but at the point that you can do 12, you can do 20 for less than double the price.

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EOS Bodies / Re: Any thoughts on how the 5d3 will compare on dxo mark to the Nikon D800?

« on: March 29, 2012, 06:08:34 PM »

If I understand correctly, DxO claims an increase in DR by the simple act of downsampling an image? This would seem to favor big MP cameras, and I question the legitimacy of the subsequent results.

I believe they are making some interpretation of "usable dynamic range". On some level, any 14 bit sensor produces 14 stops of dynamic range - if you look at the difference between the highest and lowest recorded bit.

I'm not intimately familiar with their process but I suspect that they must come up with some determination about when the noise in the shadows in unacceptable and they use that to assess the lower bound.

Downsampling will reduce the perceived noise in the shadows so that may well boost the usable dynamic range and may well drive it close to 14. The only way I can see that you could get over 14 stops would be if there was some kind of non-linearity in the adc response.

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Lenses / Re: Canon 5DmkIII vs Nikon D800

« on: March 29, 2012, 03:46:22 PM »

It isn't just the megapixel difference that makes the D800 attractive, it is the difference in DR.

14.4 vs 11.

I'm very curious about how this plays out in real world tests, especially since a 14-bit ADC (which both cameras have) shouldn't be able to exceed a theoretical maximum of 14 stops DR. Even then you'll only have 2 levels represented in your lowest stop (versus 8192 levels in your highest stop).