Messages

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EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: 5D3 and 24 1.4 II L owners please read!!!!!!!!!!!!

« on: Today at 02:30:36 PM »

Theory!

Flipping the switch triggers metering. Since evaluative metering invokes code that looks at multiple metering points and tries to intelligently guess what to do, it's somewhat reasonable to assume that it might a different decision on what to do each time it's invoked if the light entering the lens in non-uniform across the image.

A way to test if this is happening is to point the camera so the image is completely uniform in brightness across the image — at the sky, or a flatly coloured wall, etc.

Please bear in mind that I don't own this lens or camera, but I do have experience in programming. In algorithms like this, it's often the case that there's some guesswork involved — hell, I once implemented an algorithm that would just randomly choose one of tho values if it couldn't determine one value over another with any degree of certainty, and it worked just fine.

Since I doubt the camera saves the reasoning behind its metering decisions between each metering, I can easily see this sort of thing happening in something that's supposed to be "smart" like evaluative metering. If you require absolutely consistent metering, I guess evaluative isn't the right mode to choose.

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Software & Accessories / Re: How to achieve this amazing editing effect ?

« on: April 22, 2013, 09:17:11 PM »

Largest I could find of the original image is here, sized 2500x1667. It's a beautiful image!

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EOS Bodies / Re: Canon Announcements on April 23, 2013? [CR2]

« on: April 12, 2013, 07:59:35 AM »

Yes, all photographers are consumers - but, some consumers just buy cameras - that doesn't necessarily make them photographers.  Yeah yeah yeah its a nebulous term.  But, many trades are learned by apprenticing.  Like plumbing - you learn from a plumber...again, just because I buy a wrench and replace a gasket that doesn't make me a plumber.  Just because you buy a camera and snap a few shots, that doesn't make you a photographer.  That's the point the original person was making.  It's a dividing line between those who are serious and willing to learn and those that buy it cause its fancy - the latter cares about what the specs really mean, the former says that # is bigger than the other so it must be better.

Perhaps more succinctly: Just because you can write doesn't make you a writer.

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Site Information / Re: Love or Hate Canon Rumors Forum

« on: April 04, 2013, 04:16:08 PM »

This forum is one of the most polarising experiences I've had on a forum, and it's one of the reasons my post count is pretty low.

One the one hand, whenever I post questions or contribute to a thread I tend to get well informed, polite posts that are genuinely helpful and intelligent. That part of this community is wonderful.

On the other hand, whenever I go near a thread about actual cameras (i.e., the hardware that Canon produces), the thread more often than not devolves into name-calling, arguing, the confusion between fact and opinion and childish personal attacks.

Of course, the last part of my second point is present to some degree everywhere, but because I don't come here that often I haven't learned the names of the people I need to avoid, and as a newbie it paints a fairly negative picture of this place, however unfair that may actually be to the rest of the community. I know there are nice people in here, but you wouldn't be able to tell just by coming here and clicking on the recent threads list on the homepage!

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Software & Accessories / Re: FoCal 1.8.1 Released for Windows and Mac

« on: April 04, 2013, 03:36:09 PM »

I used FoCal 1.8.1 last weekend to run sharpness tests and AFMA calibration on a number of lenses. In total, I think I was using the program for a couple of hours and didn't have any trouble using Mountain Lion.

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Lenses / Re: Is my 24-105mm f/4 L unreasonably soft?

« on: March 31, 2013, 08:07:43 AM »

No, you're not misreading. Just to make sure, I re-did all the tests multiple times today when the light was better (I needed to add non-natural light yesterday) — this time it's all natural light.

Interestingly, the 105mm sharpness rose to the same-ish levels as 65mm, although the shape of the curve stayed the same. Everything else was entirely within a reasonable margin of error from yesterday.

Anyway, although the results for my 24-105L are kinda confusing between f10 and f22, they basically confirmed that my lens is behaving like one should expect — weakest at 24mm. Time to stop obsessing over numbers and go take some photos!

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Lenses / Re: Is my 24-105mm f/4 L unreasonably soft?

« on: March 30, 2013, 01:52:29 PM »

Thanks for your advice, everyone.

Well, I bit the bullet and emailed Canon's Swedish service partner, and they told me they'd want 700kr (£70, $110) to even look at it, at which point they'd tell me how much to would be to fix it, if it needed fixing at all.

Since I'm not 100% there's a problem, instead I bought FoCal, an excellent lens tuning and measuring application. First, I tuned the AFMA (which was a little bit out), then ran some sharpness tests vs. my new 40mm f/2.8 STM.

Attached are the results. As you can see, at 65mm or so my 24-105L is sharper than the 40mm, but at 24 and 105mm it's considerably worse, with 65mm being over twice as sharp as at both ends.

Now I know this, I'm less sure there's a problem. Now I know where the softest parts of the lens are I can avoid them. Still, I'm curious if such a large difference is normal.

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EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: New Online Camera/Lens Information Tool

« on: March 26, 2013, 11:01:28 AM »

I found this pretty recently, too. I used to own the Nifty Fifty, but approaching wide open it looked like, well, crap. "How can everyone love it so much?!" I thought.

Well, that tool answers my question. The variability of it on a 7D is absolutely incredible — I must've had a bad copy.

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Canon General / Re: Announcements Coming Tonight

« on: March 20, 2013, 05:04:42 PM »

I'll skip these and wait for next announcements. These don't fit in my needs.

And while we're at it, why doesn't Canon go ahead and delay it for everyone because you arn't interested?

Why the sarcasm? Dylan basically said "These things don't interest me, so I'll wait until the next announcement." No complaining that this time there's not something for him, just "Oh well, better luck next time". What's wrong with that?

On topic, my fiancée bought a 650D fairly recently. It's kinda nice to see the 700D doesn't completely wipe the floor with it! I'm actually quite interested in the SL1 - a fully-featured EOS body in a tiny package? Sounds awesome!

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Lenses / Re: 40mm f/2.8 Wow what a lens

« on: March 20, 2013, 11:41:19 AM »

I bought this lens a week ago and so far I adore it. Image quality is absolutely superb for such a cheap and tiny package.

I also love how small it is. With this lens and the silent shooting mode on my 6D, I actually feel somewhat discreet when out and about - something I haven't felt for a long long time.

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EOS Bodies / Re: 6D warning viewfinder icons I'm stumped.

« on: March 17, 2013, 05:30:35 PM »

From the manual (page 313 of the English one):

When any of the following functions are set, the <!> icon can be displayed on the lower left in the viewfinder:

- When monochrome picture style is set
- When WB is corrected
- When ISO expansion is used
- When spot metering is set

You can configure which settings trigger the ! icon (including none of them) in the custom function described on that page of the manual.

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Lenses / Is my 24-105mm f/4 L unreasonably soft?

« on: March 17, 2013, 12:26:18 PM »

I've had my 24-105mm f/4 L since 2006, and it's been my day-to-day walkaround for most of that time. I always found it difficult to get pin-sharp shots with it, but assumed it was always my technique.

However, I recently decided to check the sharpness of my lenses and perform AFMA calibration on them. What really shocked me is that my girlfriend's EF-S 17-85mm actually appears to be sharper than my 24-105 L!

If anyone here has the 24-105 L, and have done sharpness shots with it, would you mind chipping in? I wonder if this is a naturally soft lens or if mine is out of whack. I know the lens is weakest at 24mm, but mine seems to be pretty terrible!

Standard Lightroom settings, sharpness turned down to 0.

100% crop at 105mm:



100% crop at 24mm:

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EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: Should I buy the 60D or wait for the 70D?

« on: March 17, 2013, 08:10:44 AM »

I don't know exactly how fast "now" is for you, but with the Canon press event happening next Friday you'd be crazy to buy a 60D now unless you find one for an absolutely crazy price.

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Software & Accessories / Re: Help needed lightroom and photoshop machine for editing 5d mkiii raw

« on: March 12, 2013, 09:45:48 AM »

I forgot to mention that my 3GB paging file is located on the RAM Disk as well

Paging incurs some (but not much) overhead, so if you made your RAM disk 3Gb smaller and allowed the system to directly address that RAM rather than going through a pagefile you'd get better performance. Your method is still faster than hitting a spinning disk, but it does seem a tad… silly.

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Software & Accessories / Re: Help needed lightroom and photoshop machine for editing 5d mkiii raw

« on: March 12, 2013, 05:55:37 AM »

More RAM is certainly a good idea - 4Gb isn't enough. However! A poster above said he'd reserved 25Gb for a RAM disk, which only leaves 7Gb for the OS and other applications. Lightroom uses a ton of RAM, and if it runs out it'll start using the pagefile, which means hitting the hard drive, which gives a big slowdown. With 32Gb of RAM there's no reason not to use a RAM disk, but personally I'd leave a little more available for applications to use and have a smaller RAM disk. However, this is one of those things where experimentation will find the best sweet spot.

1.7GHz Core i5-2557M processor

This is going to be your second bottleneck after RAM. Lightroom is very CPU heavy (more so than Apple's Aperture, which offloads a lot more work to the graphics card than Lightroom) and I'm noticing my computer (which has a 3.2GHz i5 CPU) bogging down sometimes with 18MP pictures from my 60D when I'm doing batch edits and such.

Also, I looked up the spec sheet of that CPU (here) and it says the CPU only supports up to 8Gb of RAM. I'm not sure if that's true, but you may wish to double-check before throwing RAM at it.