Around the Web Today

The big news this morning is the official rollout of three cameras and a lens from Canon, and I'm sure interested parties will be burrowing into the features lists and happily parsing the changes and improvements. The 40D and 1DsMk3 both occupy prominent places of honor in Canon's line. The 40D is a revision of the 30D, which was a revision of the 20D, which was a revision of the 10D. Each in its turn has been Canon's mainstream beyond-entry-level DSLR for mainstream amateurs and certain types of workaday pros. The 1DsMk3 is one of the company's two flagships—the one for ultimate image quality. (Ultimate speed and pro performance for action photography is left to the 1D series.)

This conceptual line between the 1DsMk3 and the 1DMk3 blurs considerably because the 1DMk3 has superb image quality and the 1DsMk3 has superb performance. The new 1dsMk3 ups the megapixel ante over the Mk2 by quite a bit, however (26%), to 21, and that, along with its full-sized (i.e., 35mm-sized) sensor, separates it nicely from the 1DMk3. I'm sure Canon sells relatively few of these top-end cameras, but for those whose needs it fits and whose businesses can amortize the cost—and who for one reason or another don't care to get into the product universe of medium-format digital backs—it's big news. It's going to be especially tempting to art and landscape photographers who make very large prints.

So is either one for you? To help to with your thinking about that, Jeff Ascough has written a nice little piece about the three questions he asks himself to determine if he needs a new camera. Here's a brief taste:

For me, I firmly believe the purchase of all my cameras has made me a better photographer, simply because they've all been completely different from the last one. The experience that I’ve gained from using different cameras has improved my work overall. I bought an Xpan and immediately saw the world panoramically. I bought a Leica and saw the world sharp front to back. These cameras have come and gone but they've all left their mark on my style and approach, even though I now shoot with DSLRs. The trouble is my cameras now do everything I want them to do, and this makes the decision to upgrade so much harder when the latest models come along.

Easily overlooked in the shadow of the two eagerly-awaited updates is a new camera, the evolution of the G series, called the G9. Although a digicam, this one's interesting because it restores RAW capability to Canon's top-of-the-line digicam—which also proves that Canon listens to its customers, since the lack of RAW in the G7 has gathered a lot of criticism since that camera came out. (Unfortunately, they don't listen to everything—wide angle capability is still limited.)

Elsewhere on the web, J. Andrzej Wrotniak has designed experiments to help quantify how good the in-body image stabilization in the Olympus E-510 actually is. TOP readers, being highly intelligent and principled, won't just take his results out of context and repeat them mindlessly elsewhere on the web—they'll read the whole article in context and accept Andrzej's caveats and the boundaries of his experiment.    

Antonio D. is right—I really don't like this. Considering that photographs are a basic way of conveying real information, this sort of travesty  is a good way to render them suspect, or useless, or worse. The authors' next project is probably going to be to a computer program whereby written text can be re-written to change its meaning and bring it into line with the reader's own opinions and pre-existing biases. Want to read a Robert Novak column with all his opinions changed to those of a left-leaning liberal? No problem. "Seam carving" for content-aware opinion modification will take care of it....er, hold on. Bad example.

On the home front, here in Wisconsin it's monsoon season. We don't actually have a monsoon season, or at least not usually, but that hasn't stopped it from raining for three days straight. We spent a marvelous evening last night at the home of our friends Witold and Maria in Glencoe, Illinois. Real Polish hospitality is truly magnificent—Witold (who arrived from Poland in 1975 with $20 in his pocket and the clothes on his back) sent us home with a steak of grass-fed organic beef tenderloin for the dog (I cheated and fed it to the kid, despite the fact that he'd already eaten three of them at the party), and I think I can stop eating desserts now—Maria served an enormous pear tort that has to be the pinnacle of the category. I took only three pictures, and all three of them turned out pretty nicely. Here's one. The woman in the light is my cool sister-in-law, Basia.

________________

Mike  (Thanks to Albano Garcia, Stefan Zemp, and Antonio Dias)

Comments

[Matt Kerr]

I truly admire this bit of science (the testing of the E-510 IS). I think, as a scientist myself, the methodology is good for determining what he was trying to find out and I think that it relates to the real world well, of course taking into account the caveats that the author mentioned. The scientist in me started to wonder if there were alternatives that could yield even more quantitative data while still allowing for the random nature of the vibration. This is what I came up with.
As with all good experiments, we first need a "fricken'" laser beam. What I am imagining is a hot shoe mounted laser that beams directly ahead onto a test chart. Using the camera hand held (and also on a tripod if desired) one could actually measure in the image the angle of movement of the camera during the exposure by measuring the distance travelled by the laser point on the chart, not the distance on the sensor. This could allow for some normalisation for the amount of movement of the camera. It would also tell us if the camera takes into account the lens on the front (as for most effective IS the sensor would have to move more quickly and further for the same size movement with a telephoto lens compared with wide angle). The direction of movement would also be measurable except for the forward backward direction. You would also be able to see if the camera movement was affected by the balance of the lens camera combination and the inertia of the setup. The data could be separated into vibration type movements and single direction type movements to see how the IS coped with each.
All that said I like the approach that J. Andrzej Wrotniak took. I would love to see his experiment carried out on other systems and, being an Olympus junkie, would love to see Olympus beat the others... We all have our bias to bear.

[Peter Lindner]

dont forget to exercise after all that good food. Nice picture

[Janne]

Really like the rescaling, actually. Honestly, a lot of photography really only is about providing raw material for illustrations that aren't about showing reality anyhow. The worst thing you can say about it is that it saves some illustrator or graphics designer a fair amount of time and gives them a too for rapid exploration of form and composition.

People are going to delete disfavored politicians out of images, or put people in places they never were - or create pink polar bears in a tutu with the Eiffel tower on their head. Making such things easier or harder is beside the point, really. If anything, making it easier makes it clearer and more obvious that photographs are not inherently trustworthy anymore than any other media; that you have to consider the source, the likelihood, and corroborating evidence, just like you would for any other document. If things like this makes more people realize that, then so much the better.

[charlie d]

And the DRP Oly forum is in rare form as per usual when Canon or Nikon release yet another new cam. The humor is to much and the dejection by some that the E-1 (p) whatever is STILL not released is more than I can take. I swear we are gonna have a suicide by some olymaniac if that thing does not come out soon!

On the other hand, my three favorite pics of the last two weeks are of copper downspouts on an old church. Like a new ubercam is gonna do me any good. My Olympus E300 takes perfectly good pics of water diversion tubes. Copper or not......Thank you very much! ;-)

Nice post and REALLY nice pic Mike.

[Yvonne]

Geez, Mike, send me some of that rain. We haven't had a decent rain in MONTHS here near Hamilton, Ont.

[Ctein]

Dear Mike,

Re "this:" http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/IMRet-All.mov

I love it!

It comes from nearly forty years of seeing my PICTORIAL photos flopped, cropped and overwritten with effin' type fergodsakes, with no respect whatsoever given to the content or aesthetics. And this by the editors of PHOTOGRAPHY magazines who are ostensibly giving service to photographs as entities of inherent worth. My photos, though? Nothing but "design" elements, to be disrespectfully massacred as suits the whim of layout.

At least this tool will let them do it with some semblance of visual and compositional quality.

pax / Ctein

[Matthew Brown]

You know, all things considered, I find the G9 news almost more interesting than the 40D or 1Ds Mk III. Why? Because I didn't expect it, while the 40D is exactly as predictable and the IDs Mk III is only surprising in that they gave it 5fps.

I'm glad Canon put RAW back in it, especially. Either the customer-focussed people won out over the cynical "let's force people into a DSLR if they want RAW" forces at Canon, or perhaps even Canon honestly thought that the segment who previously used RAW had all moved to DSLRs anyway.

[Benjamin Thompson]

Amazing picture. I can't decide whether I'm impressed or disheartened that you only took 3 and had such a great result.

Ah well, good thing I'm still young ...

[Ian]

Jeff Ascough said that one of the prerequisits to a new camera was that it'd change the way he approach photography. Would you consider removing dynamic range as an obsticle (through hand held exposure bracketing) as enough of a change to qualify?

The 40D certainly makes hand held HDR more affordable when multiple exposure mirror lockup and 6.5 frames per second are used with exposure bracketing.

With that said and done, I do like the idea of using your camera's performance as a constraint... I mean photography is all about examining and exploring constraints.

[richard j.]

I should have stayed home. We are on our annual vacation trek to a little cottage across the lake from Milwaukee. Swimming, sun, cookouts.. I have some new pieces of gear (ok, a new body) that I've been excited to use to my hearts content. When it is monsoon season in Wisconsin, and weather moves from west to east, guess where all that rain goes next?

What's that old kids tune? rain, rain, go away....

[david blankenhorn]

G9 could still use a faster lens.
What I'd REALLY like is a manually collapsible lens like an old Leica.
You'd grab the lens,twist the lens & pull it out to turn on the camera...

I've had a G7 in my pocket during all my waking (&clothed) hours
since i got the thing.