Messages

181

Software & Accessories / Re: PixStics

« on: July 16, 2012, 08:45:30 AM »

Just wanted to let everyone know I'm currently working on several fixes/improvements to the script. Hopefully will have a new version up sometime this week or next week.

182

Lighting / Re: Multiple Flashes During Wedding Ceremony

« on: July 15, 2012, 09:28:46 PM »

Good to know. I wasn't sure if it would be annoying to people but people do tend to like getting married in really dark places and while I'm working on getting better with larger aperture lenses, I think it looks very amateurish if you have a very narrow depth of field and it doesn't have the right part of the picture in focus so I'd rather use flashes until I get there to provide enough light. wickidwombat, what did you use for triggering the flashes? Did you shoot in manual or ttl?

183

Third Party Manufacturers / Old Nikon Lenses with Adaptor

« on: July 14, 2012, 11:13:41 AM »

So I often hear people talk about using old Nikon lenses on a Canon with an adapter. I never actually see what lenses they use it with though and what they are comparable to performance wise of a current Canon lens. Is this one of those urban myths or can you actually get a nicer picture for less money going this way? I realize the limitations and so of course that has to be factored in but if we're just talking strictly image quality is this a good option?

184

Lighting / Multiple Flashes During Wedding Ceremony

« on: July 14, 2012, 10:58:36 AM »

I currently shoot with a single 430 or 580 flash during wedding ceremony's. For the stuff closer up where I can bounce it up it's pretty decent but for longer distance shots where I have it running straight through a gary fong lightsphere to soften it up some but still straight at them it's not as nice an effect. I've been thinking of getting a third flash (we shoot with 2 cameras) and I'm wondering if it would be weird to have another slave flash off camera just bringing up the ambient light in the room or if that's too distracting. Anybody have thoughts on this or done something like that before?

185

Lenses / Re: 50mm 1.4 or 40mm 2.8?

« on: July 14, 2012, 10:19:34 AM »

If I had a strict choice between the two, I'd get the 40mm lens.  Why?  First, it's cheap.  Second, it's sharp.  Third, it's 64mm on your camera which is pretty good.  However, as RLPhoto hinted at, what focal length do you need?  I would be happy with 64mm, but really the reason I shoot all FF is because when I buy a 40mm lens, I prefer not to deal with a crop factor for most shots.  I have a 1D4 because I don't mind the crop factor for sports.  So it really depends on what you need.  Picking between your two choices though, I would personally pick the 40mm.

I realised I have missed out a lot of great lenses when looking for a lens to mimic the "normal" perspective on a crop body. Any other things that I should take note of?

This is just my personal experience but the three lenses I've liked a lot on a crop camera are:
Canon 35 2.0 - Nice sharpness on a crop camera, focus is loud and a bit erratic but since it's a fairly wide lens even if focus isn't perfect it's normally close enough. Right now our main setup is this on a crop camera and the 24-105 on the fullframe. Works pretty well and I think I bought it for around $270 refurb from Canon. Great for the price

Sigma 10-20 - Obviously we're talking about normal range lenses here but if you've never used an ultra wide angle then you might look into something like this as well. Instead of giving you something BETTER that you already have it will give you something NEW. The same could be said of any of the macro options as well

Tamron 17-50 non VC - This is a pretty good lens for the money. If you're looking for something better rather than something new then this is a good option. Usable at 2.8 and really sharpens well at 4.0.

I've used the Canon 50 1.8 and actually like it better for video because the focus ring is smoother than the 35 2.0 but for everything else I've liked the 35 2.0 better. Sharpness wide open can't compare and I think the 35 has better contrast too. The Canon 50 1.4 might be a little bit better but believe me I've researched it over and over again and I a have hard time wanting to upgrade. Being on full frame now I do miss the framing of the 35 2.0 on crop so I'm renting a Zeiss Makro 50 2.0 for a wedding in September. Looking at the charts, it looks to be much better than Canon's options. Of course it's manual focus only and not cheap but I'm using it in place of the Canon 100 2.8 IS macro I normally use so if it can meet both needs it might get rented again.

I've also researched the 40 2.8. Everything seems to be really nice about this lens. My main hesitation is I already have the 35 2.0 and I'm waiting a little while longer to make sure there aren't any issues with the new focusing system on the 40 2.8. Otherwise I think I'd recommend it over the 50 1.4 but that's based on the fact that I like my lenses to be sharp wide open mainly because of the fact that unless you have the camera in AV or M it's going to use the biggest aperture.

186

Software & Accessories / Re: Canon Direct Instock Alert Tool

« on: July 13, 2012, 11:00:30 AM »

Mt Spokane Photography, which one do you specifically use? I'd like to try it out and see how long it takes to see an update on a page. Thanks.

187

Software & Accessories / Re: Canon Direct Instock Alert Tool

« on: July 13, 2012, 09:56:13 AM »

I use one to monitor the Canon Refurb store for 1D Mark IV availability.  It e-mails a notice when the product availability changes.
There are lots of web page trackers that can be customized.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=track+web+page+changes&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=track+web+page+changes&sc=2-22&sp=-1&sk=

Good to know. I'll have to investigate this further.

188

Software & Accessories / Canon Direct Instock Alert Tool

« on: July 12, 2012, 10:51:46 PM »

So I'm starting to think about the next tool I'd like to release after PixStics which I just released: http://leightyphotography.com/PixStics/

One thing I've seen as a limitation of Canon's direct store is an in stock alert system. I'd like to remedy that with a tool that would check every minute and if a product you're interested comes in stock it can either email or text you. Especially during the times where the coupon is active I can see this being very useful.

Does anybody think this is a good idea? Obviously I would use it just like I use PixStics but I'd obviously like to make sure it'll be useful to others as well if I put a bunch of time into it. Thanks.

189

Software & Accessories / Re: PixStics

« on: July 11, 2012, 10:37:44 PM »

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

Peter, do you have firebug installed? If you do, would you mind pulling up the console and letting me know if you see an error there? My guess is there's so bit of code that's failing AFTER the files get read in. It shouldn't have anything to do with the size of the files. I wrote it so that it only reads the first 32KB of each file since the EXIF data should easily be contained within that space. Also, do you have Chrome installed? If so, could you try running it in there as well? I did most of the development in Chrome but I did do limited testing in Firefox and everything seemed to work there. Also, if you could let me know what properties and detail levels and chart type you have it set at that would help too. Thanks.

Hi Brian, I had a chance to do some more testing today and I do get a Firebug error:

exifData.subifd is undefined
http://leightyphotography.com/PixStics/js/customJavascript.js Line 282

Line 282 is:

simplifiedData['aperture'] = exifData['subifd']['f-stop'];

I've also tracked it down to one particular image Nikita.jpg (posting name here so I don't forget which) and all works fine if I deselect that image. Doing a right-mouse click it does contain aperture information and all the other usual fields and nothing appears much different to other images in the folder. Let me know if you want me to e-mail the image.

P.S. This happened with all the chart options set at their defaults as per when the page is first loaded.

Brian, don't mean to teach you to suck eggs... You could put your code in a try/catch/finally block and ignore the files causing errors.

I don't do too much with try and catch. I guess mostly 'cause I don't understand it well enough and simple if statements work most of the time but yes that is my plan if I can't get the original file. However, I would prefer to know why it's not getting defined in the first place because that means that the aperture data isn't getting read properly which is very odd given that's not a maker specific property where there are most of the issues. Thanks for your input rpt. If you have any good links to a tutorial that explains try catch in javascript well I'd be interested to read it.

190

Software & Accessories / Re: PixStics

« on: July 11, 2012, 09:56:41 PM »

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

Peter, do you have firebug installed? If you do, would you mind pulling up the console and letting me know if you see an error there? My guess is there's so bit of code that's failing AFTER the files get read in. It shouldn't have anything to do with the size of the files. I wrote it so that it only reads the first 32KB of each file since the EXIF data should easily be contained within that space. Also, do you have Chrome installed? If so, could you try running it in there as well? I did most of the development in Chrome but I did do limited testing in Firefox and everything seemed to work there. Also, if you could let me know what properties and detail levels and chart type you have it set at that would help too. Thanks.

Hi Brian, I had a chance to do some more testing today and I do get a Firebug error:

exifData.subifd is undefined
http://leightyphotography.com/PixStics/js/customJavascript.js Line 282

Line 282 is:

simplifiedData['aperture'] = exifData['subifd']['f-stop'];

I've also tracked it down to one particular image Nikita.jpg (posting name here so I don't forget which) and all works fine if I deselect that image. Doing a right-mouse click it does contain aperture information and all the other usual fields and nothing appears much different to other images in the folder. Let me know if you want me to e-mail the image.

P.S. This happened with all the chart options set at their defaults as per when the page is first loaded.

Thanks Peter. Not sure how personal that photo is. If you'd be willing to email to me it'd be great to be able to test it myself. It can be as small as you want as long as it have the exif data untouched. If it does indeed have the aperture then it would seem strange that that property is missing. The email address if you don't mind sending it is contact at leightyphotography.com. If it's a personal picture then I can try and make some changes and have you try testing it but it be much more helpful to do multiple test on my own if you don't mind. Thanks for everyone's help. I'm currently working on building in duplicate file detection and if I get enough request for it will build in the splitting by camera or lens.

191

Software & Accessories / Re: Focusing screen for 5d Mark ii

« on: July 11, 2012, 03:42:42 PM »

Hi there,

I tried the EG-S screen in my 5DII. I personally didn't like it. It was ok with my fast primes but not with the 24-105.

I haven't tried any of the custom solutions yet and would be concerned about the metering being thrown off. I put the factory screen back in and decided to live with it. Any time I pick up my AE-1p with its beautiful large and bright screen and split prism I can only shake my head and wonder why nobody has figured this out for modern DSLRs yet.

I'm guessing the issue with the 24-105 was because it was too dark?

192

Software & Accessories / Re: Focusing screen for 5d Mark ii

« on: July 11, 2012, 12:17:49 PM »

Alright, it sounds like I'm going with an EG-S screen (not expecting things to be perfect but obviously a much cheaper choice). I've seen some cheap knock offs but the reviews don't look too good. At least with the Canon I know it'll be an upgrade from what I have at a fairly cheap price. Thanks.

193

Software & Accessories / Re: Focusing screen for 5d Mark ii

« on: July 11, 2012, 07:45:23 AM »

Thanks for your input jacktacka. Sounds like an interesting option but it does seem like some people say the prism isn't the perfect solution either. One either thing I read somewhere was a viewfinder magnifying attachment. Anybody ever messed with something like that? What's your thoughts there?

194

Software & Accessories / Re: PixStics

« on: July 10, 2012, 03:10:42 PM »

Works fine for me, Its a neat exercise.
Since I use lightroom, I can see 4 parameters of my chosing at once, and drill down thru subdirectories as well as see stats for raw images, which all of mine are.  100,000 images takes just a seciond or two.

Sounds interesting. I'll have to check out a demo of lightroom to see what you're talking about. My guess is they must have a database they're using. Not a bad idea if I could do something similar of a database client side with all the information need then it could almost become more of an index thing for more long term use. One other thing I'm planning on is even further segmenting than the two properties right now. I just have to figure out which way to move forward as the graphs are limited to 2 properties so I have to segment it a different way.

195

Software & Accessories / Re: PixStics

« on: July 10, 2012, 02:32:49 PM »

This is a great idea! Now just program it to run inside of LR4's internal archive and work inside our catalogs. Then Sell it for 9.99$ as an add-on and I'd be happy to purchase this.

I'm afraid that will never happen. I honestly can't take credit for very much of this project. I actually built very little of it and instead am using existing scripts combined together to do what I wanted it to. I would never feel comfortable charging for this since it's really not mine to sell and thus will always be free. I'm sure figuring out ways to improve the scripts integration with existing workflows would be nice and if it's possible then I'd be willing look into trying to build some of that in but I honestly don't know where you would start with that.