Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

The much requested, often rumoured, previously promised firmware upgrade for the 5D Mark II is now available from the Canon website. From the release notes:

Firmware Version 2.0.3 incorporates five enhancements to the movie function and a fix to the manual sensor cleaning function of the EOS 5D Mark II camera.

Adds or changes the following movie frame rates.

NTSC:
1920×1080 : 30 fps (changed – actual 29.97 fps)
1920×1080 : 24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
640×480 : 30 fps (changed – actual 29.97 fps)
PAL:
1920×1080 : 25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)
1920×1080 : 24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
640×480 : 25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)

Adds a function for manually adjusting the sound recording level (64 levels).
Adds a histogram display (brightness or RGB) for shooting movies in manual exposure.
Adds shutter-priority AE mode (Tv) and aperture-priority AE (Av) mode to the exposure modes for shooting movies.
Changes the audio sampling frequency from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz.
Fixes a phenomenon where communication between the camera and the attached lens is sometimes interrupted after manual sensor cleaning. (This phenomenon only affects units with Firmware Version 1.2.4.)

According to Philip Bloom, the update also ups the bit rate of video from 38mbits to around 44mbits. I’ll upgrade mine later today and give it a try if I get a chance. It will be great to have 25fps being from a PAL country.

Another image from the Archives. Taken in Kilorglin, Kerry a few years ago. Eos 5D, Straight out of the Camera.

Following up on my comments from the other day about the new Canon Rebel / 550D, DXO labs have run their tests on a pre-production model and the results are…..well, I think they speak for themselves:

“Yeah, but it’s got 18 megapixels maaaannnnn, that’s all that matters”

[UPDATE]
Just a quick point. I picked the D90 because it’s a camera that I know. Bear in mind that the D90 is two years old. I’m not trying to make this a Canon / Nikon thing. I own 3 DSLRs and two of them are Canons. I know test results aren’t everything either, but they do seem to match up with people’s experiences of other Cameras on there so I would give them a reasonable amount of credit.

I just don’t understand what the people at Canon are thinking any more. I really don’t. I’ve been a long time Canon user, and a long time fan, but I really do think they’ve lost the plot when it comes to product development. Today, I see in my RSS reader they’ve launched yet another Rebel. The Eos 550D (or Rebel T2i. ) is the latest in a long line of entry level DSLRs from Canon. My first ever DSLR was one of these. In fact it was the first Digital Rebel, or the EOS 300D as it was called over here in Europe. It was a great little camera and a breakthrough at the time. Lately Canon have been churning them out every year. To be honest it’s not really a segment of the market that interests me much any more. Having said that I am shocked by the 55OD

Why? Canon have chosen to put a 18 Megapixel Cropped APS-C sized sensor into this latest rebel. But wait, I hear you say, that’s brilliant. Already some over enthusiastic Canon fans are calling it a “Very Powerful Entry Level” camera. And, I suppose in some ways it would appear so, or at least it would if resolution was everything. But it isn’t. The 550D is an entry level camera. At the level of customer this is aimed at, 18 megapixels is completely and utterly pointless. No consumer level lens is ever going to be able to resolve the detail of that amount of pixels in such a small space. The only way to ever get sharp Images from this is to go out an buy L series lenses from Canon, the majority of which cost more than the price of this Camera. I’m sure people will tell me that the extra resolution will be great for cropping and zooming, but that’s bull, because you can’t crop in if the Image isn’t sharp to begin with. The other excuse you frequently hear is that the extra resolution will make up for lack of pixel level sharpness. But this is also bull. If your image is soft at 18 megapixels it’s still soft. It’s just soft in extra detail.

Instead of improving the quality of a lower resolution sensor, instead of creating cameras that suit its target market Canon, has chosen to compete on paper, on spec lists, and that’s a real shame. What’s even more of a shame is that it will probably work for them. People will think that they’re getting a bargain because they’re getting such a high resolution sensor for such a low price, but they’re going to have to spend far more to actually make use of it. In the end, people who are entering the world of Photography and want to learn are being done a great disservice by cameras like this. Already we’re starting to see bad habits and misinformation permeate the consciousness of the internet when it comes to Photography, perpetrated by fans of these high resolution cameras to make up for their gear’s shortcomings. Eager enthusiasts are being told that their pictures are supposed to be slightly soft, and that checking them at 100% for sharpness makes them a bad photographer. What’s next? Chromatic Aberration is a good thing? That unsightly purple fringing is “art”? Every time Canon crams more pixels into their sensors they lower the quality of the resulting image, and in the rush to embrace higher resolution, up and coming photographers are loosing out on the necessary skill to take technically critical images.

I know this sounds like a terrible rant, and it is. I know a lot of people will disagree with me, and that’s fair enough. Having said that DP Review already has sample images up and some look terrible. They look like the result you would expect from a digital compact. Shame on Canon for abandoning the principles of quality and perfection that many of us grew up respecting them for  in order to find the cheapest way to make sales. This camera will probably be a huge success, but that success will be a great disservice to the name of Photography.

[Updated to fix a few Typos]

(I know this is a touchy subject, and I appreciate a spirited discussion, but please keep it civil. Any rude, personally insulting comments etc will be deleted)

I was cooking in the Kitchen tonight when I glanced out the window to see the most amazing sky, so I grabbed the nearest camera (there are a lot in my house!) and ran out to capture it before it was gone. I’m amazed this turned out as well as it did because I was hand holding it braced against the railing. It was a fairly long exposure, yet it’s reasonably sharp. If anything I probably over-sharpened it in Photoshop a little. Incidentally, I used this as my Photo of the day for my 365 Project.

Canon 5D Mark II, 24-105.

This is one of of the first pictures I ever took with a digital camera. Well, sorry, with a digital SLR. I took this in 2004 using my then brand new Canon Eos 300D. In fact it was in the very first batch of pictures I took with it, and to this day it remains one of my favorites. If I was to take it again today, I probably would have focussed on the number and not the front, or perhaps even stop down a bit to get both in focus. Still, there’s something about this image that I love. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia. The boat of course is long since gone. The whole area where I took it has dramatically changed in fact, but then I guess this is true of any area in these times.

One of my Ideas to increase productivity during the year was to take a different subject each month and work on mastering it. I had decided to do flower photography for the month of January. Unfortunately due to the bad weather I haven’t really been able to get out to the florist to get some good flowers. Anyway, I managed to get some reasonably decent specimins from the supermarket and set about working out some setups last night. Here’s the first result of my experimentation. I think it’s fairly good.

The lighting setup is pretty simple. I have my 430EX flash connected to my 5DII off camera to the left of frame. I’m using a lastolite tri-grip diffuser to soften the light, and I have a piece of white card on the other side to bounce back to the shadow areas. Oh, and it was taken with the Canon 100mm Macro Lens. I used Live View and zoomed in so that I could manually focus the lens accurately. Autofocus wasn’t getting me anywhere on this one. Live View makes getting a good manual focus a snap though. More to come.

Ok, so I know the whole snow theme is getting a bit repetitive at this stage, but we don’t get a lot of snow here, so I can’t help it. Anyway, I promise that this will be the last Snow related thing for a while (unless we get the blizzard they were forecasting). I did this the other day and never got round to posting it here. Anyway, enjoy.

Canon has released an upgrade to it’s professional telephoto lens, the popular 70-200mm f2.8L IS USM adding a “II” to the already lengthy name. The new lens features a new optical design and new coatings to improve performance. It also decreases the minimum focussing distance. It’s scheduled to be released in April but price is not yet set. Expect it to be expensive.

(via Rob Galbraith)

Here’s a short few clips I took while out Photographing the snow the other day. Of particular interest is the second shot where you can clearly see one of the 5DII’s Achilles heels. If you notice the brickwork you see the diagonal lines caused by the aliasing which gives completely the wrong pattern (if you see the full res version you’ll really see what I’m talking about). There’s no real way to fix this in post production either, bar comping in a still taken as a photograph. While this camera is great for video on shallow depth of field scenes such as people with most of the frame out of focus etc, it performs very poorly on scenes like this.

Some Short Snow Scenes from Thomas Fitzgerald on Vimeo.