16-35 or 17-40?

BL said:
If you buy now and canon releases something else down the line, you're still ahead.

I bought my 16-35 II for $1250 back in 2008. I sold it last year for $1218 on ebay. It's like I had a free 6 year rental and have thousands of images to show for it.

If your gear is clean and looks pristine, L lenses hold their value exceptionally well. Take the pictures you want now and sell it for little to no loss, using those funds to buy the next new thing that comes along.

Thats very true. I usually wait until lenses hit a low point on price when I buy. I have done very well selling them later. Canon L lenses tend to hold their value very very well.
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Full Frame Vs Crop Sensor

Northstar said:
privatebydesign said:
It is just magnification and aperture, once you accept that, however convoluted the route to getting there, then it is easier on the mind.

Start to think magnification and aperture and all the inconsistencies and complications fall away.

PBD....you're right, i had always thought of the three.... focal length, distance to subject, aperture....but when i read what you wrote, "start to think magnification and aperture" only....you're right, it's easier to think of it that way.

thanks,
north

Glad it helped, t least one person. ;)
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Why Image Quality isn't Everything

mackguyver said:
LetTheRightLensIn said:
Don Haines said:
And don't forget Bigfoot, countless UFOs, and the Loch Ness monster. Poor photos can be iconic.

I got a snap of the Yeti on a one pixel camera! I love that single white pixel. It gets across the true essence of the Yeti and it was also accepted as solid proof by a leading cryptozoologist.
That sounds like my gigapixel panorama of the blue sky - I've been fielding calls from NASA ;)

Also, I don't know if you guys saw this set of photos (also from India) - I think the 2nd photo was selected as a photo of the year for Reuters or someone:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016812/Leopard-attack-India-Big-cat-knifed-beaten-village-rampage.html

And yes, I know some of you hate the Daily Mail, but photos are photos and this is the best source for these particular ones

I also found this second (possibly NSFW) set that some might find rather disturbing:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/leopard-attack-gallery-animals-loose-graphic-content-1437991

wow, crazy...thanks for posting mack!
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On the spot flexible recording settings

One thing I noticed when moving over to the 5D is that when you switch between video and stills in Manual mode it keeps the same exposure settings. So often enough, when I'm taking stills and want video, I don't have to do much adjusting. I was coming from a 60D so this was new.

If you want good quality and you want to get close in-camera, there's no blanket setting that will work. It's like trying to find blanket settings for stills in an emergency. How do you know if your "emergency" will be arise in mid-day sun outside or at a dimly lit event. Any way you slice it, you'll have to adjust on the fly. I would maybe suggest auto-exposure for a real emergency setting... but I know that's hard to admit.
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Classified for Sell Section on CR

Canon Rumors said:
A buy and sell forum has been on our minds for a while. People seem to want it, however there are two big forums that already do it, and I think one of them does it very well, that being fredmiranda.com

I imagine Fred spent a considerable amount of resources to develop the rating and feedback system, I would have to find a developer that could implement similar features. I would also have to find an angle that would make the buy and sell here unique to the other sites. More of the same rarely works out.

The other issue is policing it, and watching for scams. Even though it's not the web sites fault, when someone does get scammed, we're going to have to deal with the fallout. I'm not sure I really have the stomach for that.

I'll think a little harder about it, a few other things are being implemented in the next 30 days at CR, so I'd like to get all that done before we take on another project.

Thanks for the great feedback as usual folks!

Bump ;D

Given it any more thought? This straight PHP/DB dev or something more?
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Anything shot with an EOS-3 35mm

Dfunk99 said:
I still have an EOS-3 that I bought brand new in 2002, & it has a roll of Provia 100F that has been in the camera now for 2 years, mainly because I only use it on sunny days. I only use my 24-105 or my 17-40 lenses right now with it - sometimes my 50mm 1.8 as well. I also have an Epson 4990 scanner that I bought about 7 years ago & it still works fine. If you scan your slides or negs, you'll need something to clean up the images because there is still some noise even in ISO 100 film compared to what I get in my 50D or my 30D. The EOS-3 is a Beast in my opinion & focuses Very fast! Enjoy it!

Yeah the scanning process can introduce noise. I wonder if stacking multiple scans can reduce the scanning noise? Im thinking the process would be similar to that used for astrophotography. Well i have some things to try. :)

I took it out this weekend and used it with my 600mm f/4L. I did notice that it focused very fast. I was surprised at the speed for an early 2000 model. Cant wait to finish up this first roll so i can see how it performed.
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Neon Bright Stockholm

Thanks everyone! You really are a constructive community and you are helping me grow so much!

I would like to say to those who like more "close up" shots that, although I would have liked it much, I don't currently have any lens longer than 105mm, so it's a quite difficult task taking these kind of shots.

For the perspective, I actually like these curved, extended, stretched builing, because it gives me a pretty dynamic feeling of the place, it feels less static.

As for the post processing details, I pushed the shadows and pulled highlights, and later on I added clarity. Next, I have used the highlight panel on Adobe Camera Raw to add the color tonality and as last step, I’ve added a gradient filter with -2.0 exposure and red or brown color. All made only on ACR.

Next time I will try a little black&white as suggested. I'm not familiar with B&W, so I'll have to practice a bit.
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Oh neat, a Nikon 300f2 (1981)

mrsfotografie said:
chromophore said:
Nikon hasn't designed anything faster than f/1.4 in decades. Even the much-hyped 58/1.4G was not the Noct-Nikkor 58/1.2 that Nikon fans were dreaming of. It's rather ironic, considering how some of these old designs (Canon FL/FD 55/1.2, Yashica ML 55/1.2, Canon EF 50/1.0L, the Noct-Nikkor, and Minolta Rokkor PG 58/1.2) still perform admirably well and are coveted by today's photographers for their "look."

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I believe I've read somewhere that the Nikon lens mount is too 'tight' (rear element cannot be large enough) for a 50 or 85mm brighter than f/1.4. Although that may be based on double Gauss designs, I think with retrofocus it should be possible to go brighter.

The flange and mirror box geometry for the Nikon F-mount is large enough to permit an f-number as fast as f/1.2, but no faster. The Canon EF mount has a limit of f/1.0. (Both rounded to the nearest 1/3 stop increment.)

Designs such as the Noct-Nikkor 58/1.2 and Nikkor 50/1.2 exist, but these are manual focus lenses. I suspect that from a practical standpoint, an AF lens of this speed is not possible for the F-mount, which is why none exist.

A few years ago there were some crackpots out there who argued (vehemently and endlessly) that this geometric limitation did not in fact exist, and babbled nonsensically about telecentric designs that could permit faster f-numbers. This is complete and total bull**** mentioned by people who do not understand basic principles of geometric optics. Others have argued that you could put a condensing group behind the lens to make the lens faster. Yes, you could do this, but it would (1) reduce the image circle, and (2) enter the mirror box. We've heard the news about the 4/3rds adapters that essentially perform this function: of course, it is possible only because the original lens was designed for a certain back focal distance, and on a smaller format mirrorless camera, there is sufficient space (and no mirror) to fit additional lens elements and no concerns about the reduced image circle.

For your reading pleasure, I refer you to this very educational resource: http://www.pierretoscani.com/echo_shortpres.html#shortpres04
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Flash help

ninjapeps said:
If you decide to go with Canon, it might be best to go for the 600ex for future proofing.
I would like too, but that's not an option at the moment as I just bought a 70D three days back, and have a 24-105L to pay for in the next week. The more I read (B&H reviews) the more I think I'll probably end out with the Nissin!!
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Canon 5D3 SD and CF testing (slow slot problem)

Drizzt321 said:
mikejkay said:
Chromatropic - great to get some data and many thanks. Is it possible/likely that Canon will produce a firmware update to "uncripple" the SD card slot? I already have UHS-1 SD cards, my bottleneck seems to be the older (legacy) 300x CF cards that I use. Anyway, many thanks for all your effort and for putting it into the public domain.

This is likely a hardware thing. So it's not crippled, it's just the design at the time it was created. I'd be willing to bet that there's only 1 super-fast card 'port' on the DIGIC chip, and the other hangs off of essentially hangs off of the USB bus as a USB card reader, which basically limits it to 60 MB/sec theoretical max bandwidth, but because of the design age they only put in an SDHC (or was it SDXC?) which is the previous spec for SD cards which maxes out at ~30MB/sec theoretical performance.

As mackguyver put it, I'd bet that the camera pulls the RAW into memory, if it's supposed to write as RAW it generates the thumbnail JPG to write into the RAW file, and if it's supposed to write a JPG file it generates the JPG at the size & quality specified. At this point, it writes the file(s) out to the memory cards in parallel, and I'd bet via DMA (at least to the CF slot, which would help free up the CPU to an extent). At this point, if it finishes writing to the CF card, but the SD card is still waiting to finish it's write, it keeps that entire photo in memory (final output to both cards, so if JPG + JPG, the JPG for both, or if RAW + JPG, the RAW to the CF and JPG to the SD). So it essentially holds up a good chunk of your buffer while waiting to finish writing out to the SD slot. Once it's done writing that image, it clears out that particular images space in the buffer and you free up room for another photo in the buffer.

I think this is why, no matter what combination, continuous shooting for RAW+JPG is less than for just RAW. Both because of the extra CPU to generate the JPG, and the extra buffer space needed by the JPG.

And mikejkay, just go ahead and get a newer, higher speed CF card. You can get a quality Transcend 400x (90MB/sec read, 60 MB/sec write) UDMA7 compatible card for less than $40 from B&H. I've got them, use them quite a bit. Works great in my 5d3. It'll also just plain be faster than any SD card unless you regularly do a low-level format on the SD card as the UDMA7 supports TRIM, which lets the CF card clear out the blocks ahead of time instead of waiting until it actually needs to write to them.
I did some testing tonight and can confirm that the 5DIII is limited to 30MB/s - it's the same buffer depth as my 80MB/s card. 30MB/s is the max for Class 10 - UHS-I is the next standard, but the hardware likely wasn't available at scale when the 5DIII was designed. Fortunately the CF slot supports the latest UDMA7 150MB/s write speed cards!
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Canon Will Attend The Photography Show in March

wockawocka said:
jeffa4444 said:
Canon will be making a major annoucement at this show.

No there won't.

Correct, there was no announcement as of yesterday. However, Canon staff claimed to "have not heard a single rumour about the 7D successor and couldn't see what the point of one was as the 70D has DPAF, better IQ and is only 1 fps slower", which sounded a bit suspect. It wwould have been more convicing to say that they had heard the rumours, but had no idea of specs or delivery as HQ hadn't told them anythig.

Hey ho ;)
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UPDATE: EOS M2 Not Coming to North America

traveller said:
AvTvM said:
Sanaraken said:
Yes Canon is very sucessfull and know what they are doing. Thats why they dominate. Why would they come out with a really good mirrorless and I know they have the technology already. It will canabilize their sales on the DSLR market specially the Rebels.

Why? Because otherwise Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Olympus and all others will cannibalize their Rebels and all of their other DSLRs with the possible exception of action-oiented models (1D-X)? ;D

They haven't so far and growth in mirrorless in at least two major markets has reversed.

That's not to say that there's no future for mirrorless, nor that mirrorless isn't the future, just that it doesn't seem to be the present. Why would Canon and Nikon risk undermining their supremacy by bringing out 'pro' mirrorless cameras? Isn't that effectively endorsing their competitors' efforts? If Canon and Nikon dump their legacy mounts, what competitive advantage do they have over the likes of Sony or Fujifilm?

I think that's the crux of Canon's current dilemma. They didn't want to rock the boat by developing mirrorless, but evidently elements in their hierarchy felt the need to enter what was a growing market (hence EOS-M and Nikon 1). Now that the growth has died, so has Canon and Nikon's enthusiasm for their mirrorless systems.

Who knows how this will end up, maybe EOS-M will develop into a fully fledged system (especially if there is room for a full frame sensor in the specification), or the EF mount may start to evolve towards going mirrorless. I suspect that this isn't fully decided at Canon and will depend on what happens in the market this year.

Personally my feeling is that reduced flange distance on FF is simply much less of an advantage than on ASPC since your having to deal both with larger lenses for a larger image circle and long lenses to avoid more extreme light angles.

I think its notable that both Canon and Nikon have put most of their focus on FF devolpment over the last couple of years, more levels of body on offer and a lot of new lenses on offer whilst EF-S/DX lenses have been limted mostly to kit updates.

To me it looks like theres a real divide in the mirrorless market between east and west, in the former ultra small view finderless bodies make up most of the sales, in the latter theres a much smaller market focused on higher end bodies with viewfinders. My guess is if Canon come up with a higher end ASPC body then it will be released in the west.
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Sailing the Whitsunday Islands & the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Hi all,

I've pulled together a short video of our recent sailing trip in the Whitsundays Australia, all shot on a Canon 5D Mark III.

Although most days were fast and furious, I didn't use any fancy stabilisation gear. I just shot with a tripod attached to the camera and carried it handheld. The inertia of the tripod smoothed the motion of the video footage... quite effective.

http://youtu.be/stoRJxX3b_k

600 ex rt GEL holder, seriously?

Viggo said:
Jim Saunders said:
As luck would have it the MagMod gel holder I ordered arrived recently; the band holds tight to the flash and the gel holder seems solid on it. The gels seem easily scratched but I doubt that can be helped, worst-case I can bond some gel film to a thin oiece of glass or whatever. It is much easier to change gels with it compared to Canon's somewhat awkward holder. Photos later if anyone is interested.

Jim

Good stuff ! I'm highly interested in your experience with the MagMod, it looks awesome.

I'll try for next week; I'm fully occupied until then but I'll be in better shape afterward.

Jim
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