Category Archives: Camera

New Canon camera

Canon EOS 7D

Well, I broke down and bought a replacement camera to my Canon EOS 20D. Normally, the series naming convention is x0D. And the latest in the series is the 50D. However, it seems Canon has introduced a new line of cameras that fits between the 50D and the 1D Mark III. The Canon 7D.

This also got me in the mood of inputting all of my camera related purchases into an XML document. And, out of curiosity, I totaled it all up. Sesh, I have spent more than a luxury vehicle…

Austin Skyline #1
Austin Skyline #2

One of the first places I went to take pictures with it was downtown on Ladybird Lake along Auditorium Shores. It’s such a shame, but I don’t get down here very often. And I have never taken pictures of this famous skyline. The bridge is South 1st Street and I am south of the river.

New toy, err, not yet

Ahhh… a new toy arrived. No, wait. I don’t own that toy yet. I have been intrigued by the tilt/shift lenses that Canon makes. You can read more about them and what they do here and here. So I decided to test drive one out by renting it from this store. RentGlass.com has a cool model. Very Netflix like. Their only problem is that they have very low inventory. So you have to fight over renting one. You get notified over email that a lens that you are interested in is in stock. So you hurry up and try to rent it. But 99% of the time, someone else got lucky and rented it first.

TS-24 sample

My first picture was one of Roads and Boats. I set up the tripod against the table. The camera was positioned about three feet above the table and was pointed downwards at a 47 degree angle. This is a fixed (or prime) lens, so I positioned the box on the table mostly in the field of view. I then adjusted the shift to move the box into the frame.

There are two problems with this lens. The first is that it is manual focus. You can overcome this by repeatedly half-pressing the shutter while moving the focus around. The familiar red boxes will light up when a focus lock is detected. However, the focus can get squirley when the lens plane is moved around. The other problem is that the minimum aperature is f/3.5. This is 2/3 of a stop bigger than a f/2.8 lens. Which requires more light to shoot and looses out on bokeh. 24mm is a pretty good field of view if I wanted to get this to take food shots, or architecture shots. The 45mm version has a minimum aperature of f/2.8 which is the minimum that I want, but it is not an “L” lens. The 45mm would have a smaller field of view as well, so I would have to possibly stitch pictures together.

TS-24 sample histogram

Although I will admit that the histogram looks suspicious. Small range and some blown colors.