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Well looks like we have the specs for the Canon 1D Mark IV to wet our appetites for a while.   Surprisingly the unit will be released around December in time for the superbowl most likely — starting street price body-only — $4,999.00!

Here are the specs:

• 10 FPS
• 16.1 MP APS-H CMOS censor
• ISO Range Native: 100 up to 12,800 in 1/3 or 1/2 stop increments, with ISO Expansion: 50 and 25,600, 51,200, and 102,400. [Editor: Native is really the only one that should be looked at]
• Dual DIGIC 4 Processors [Editor: 16x more processing power than the DIGIC 3 system]
• M-RAW and S-RAW [Editer: Medium and small sized RAW files]
• Better Noise control
• Enhanced Custom Functions [Editor: Ok, now they're just reaching for more points, really? how enhanced are they? ]
• [Editor: Something about 1080p and 720p video as well .... ]

What I’m really impresssed with so far are:

1. The new AF tracking system, here is a quote from the Canon website: “As an example, with an EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, the EOS-1D Mark IV can track a subject approaching at 50 kph/31 mph up to about 8 meters/26.2 feet away. This is the same specification as the EOS-1D Mark III. However, with the 39 cross-type AF points, the Mark IV’s subject detection and tracking performance have improved substantially over the EOS-1D Mark III’s. This combination of hardware and software (AI Servo II AF algorithm) improvements enables a more stable AI Servo AF control.”   Which translates to locking and tracking a subject without having to keep the AF point on the subject.   The system will actually track the subject and select the proper AF point as it needs to.
2. Noise Control!  How molly it looks nice at ISO 2000.

Sample movie and images can be found on the Canon Japan site.

For more information please visit the Canon Digital Learning Center.

There are no magic bullets on getting a knife’s edge sharp picture.

Here are some steps that you need to get you 50% there, the rest you’ll have to do…

1. Use a tripod, monopod, or anything else.
   Before you even ask — YES, you need one.  The best one that you’ll actually carry with you.
   • Be it, a $450 carbon-fiber Manfrotto, or a $12 Walmart special.  Having it and using it better than having it and not using it.
   • This includes a ziplock full of rice that you can slap down and use as a bed to place your camera on, to using the side of a building to push your camera against.
   • A proper stance is the last part of this.  Left hand underneath against your chest, cradling the camera on your palm, your fingers spread out being parted by the lens.
2. Use a fast shutter speed.
   The general rule of thumb is that if you at 100mm focal length, you can hand hold up to 1/100th of a second or faster. I would not tell anyone to hand hold anything below 1/80th — as your blood pressure, heart beat, and simple act of breathing can introduce movement in the image.   This goes double for longer focal length.
3. Use good glass.
   You have to do your research before buying your glass.  Almost all main lens manufacturers have your “regular” or “consumer” lenses, and also a “professional” series.  The main difference is the construction and optics that are used in the lens.  Canon has the “L” series, Sigma has the “EX” series,  Tamron well they don’t but they claim all of their lenses are professional.
4. Use the proper depth of field — good focus
   A whole lot of images are in fact very sharp — you just don’t like where the sharpness is.  This is because of poor focus, because the subject moved, you moved or you just mis-focus.  This plus, a small depth of field puts all or some of your subject out of focus, and not very sharp.  Using manual focus is obviously idle, if possible.  Using a larger depth of field (smaller aperture) would also help.  If you camera has a “auto-keep-focus” such as the Canon AI Servo that will lock and keep focus will also help if the subject is moving.
5. Use a short focal length
   Now this one is my personal note, I think most people try to zoom too much.  Most your feet and get closer to your subject and fill the frame.   Use the shortest focal length you have (without going into the wide range [< 50mm]).
6. Proper post-processing
   Unlike film, almost all digital images need some post processing.  Specially USM (UnSharpen mark) — opposite to it’s name it’s actually a tool that sharpens your images.  It is not a tool to sharpen a blurry image, but if you have done everything else this last step will give you that extra pop of sharpness.

As always, there are dozen different answers to every question, but I am hoping that these small points help someone get a sharper image.

The prize winning, Nature and Wildlife Photographers of Long Island (NWPLI) has teamed yet again with Castello Di Borghese Winery for an Autumn Exhibition of Nature Photography.  The show runs from November 14th, 2009 until December 12th, 2009.   There is also a meet the artists reception at the Winery will be Saturday, November 21st from 12-3 PM.  Please come and see the amazing Nature and Wildlife photography at its very best.

Well I must have slipped or something because I totally over exposed this poor Dahlia.

As you can see I was holding the flash way too close on the bottom and totally overexposed the bottom of the flower.  Well there is a an easy way to save  this image.

If you don’t already know I’m a very big proponent of Lightroom.  It has made my life so much easier.  I can find sports images in seconds with the nice keyword searches, and I hardly ever go into Photoshop anymore.  If I do, I’m there for 30minutes to a day because what I need to do is usually a huge task.  The rest of the work is all done in LR.

This image can be saved in a matter of seconds.

First we need to identify the tool that we would like to use.  As the overexposure happened from a side, this means we need to reduce the exposure of the bottom without changing the exposure on top.  So the gradient (moving from one color to another) negative exposure is what we need.

First, lets switch to the Developer Module by either clicking “Develop” on the top row, or by hitting “D”.   The gradient tool is a right below the Histogram on the right side of the developer module, and it looks like a box with 3 dotted lines going through it.   The 4th option from the left, and 2nd option from the right.   You can see it below circled.

Now choose “Exposure” from the drop down list in front of Effect.  Next move the slider all the way left so that it reads -4.00.  That’s right we’re going to way underexpose the image so that we can see where the gradient will start and end.  Afterward we will pull the exposure back up and we’ll end up where we want.

Now click on where the image is “most” over exposed, and while holding the left mouse down drag the mouse towards where the exposure is correct.  You should be able to see the exposure change as you’re doing this, if your computer is a little slow, just hold the mouse steady without letting go of the button and LR will catch up. When you’re happy with the size of the gradient let go of the mouse, but don’t click anywhere on the picture, if you do you’ll start a new gradient.  If this should happen, click “Cancel” on the bottom right hand corner of the tool window.  You can grab the old gradient to change it’s value by clicking the little white dot (handler) that is on the image.

As you can see we have underexposed the flower on the bottom now, but we can also see exactly where the gradient starts.  If you know exactly how much exposure you need than you can set it from the start, but me, I can’t tell from the image how badly I’ve done something so I usually just go over and reduce as needed.

Now let’s increase the exposure until the bottom and the top matches.

As you can see we now have a properly exposure flower, ready to be matted and framed for the gallery or show.

Also, please notice that the history on the left shows us all of the steps that we completed.  At this point I usually take a “snapshot” of the history point so that I can break this off and/or continue to play with the image to see if anything else can be changed to make it better.  In this case I might run it through Noise Ninja once at a low setting.

Final export:

This is one of those topics that keeps coming up. Almost all digital files are “compressed” formats. Which means they have “zip-like” functionality built-into them. With Zip, or Windows Compress, if you zip a document, or a file — when you unzip it, you get the same exact file back (hopefully). Well this is not true for most digital media formats, such for Audio, Video, or Pictures. These lossy formats actually throw away information to make the file smaller. You can never get that original data back. Now let’s admit — most people cannot tell the difference in listening to a MP3 (lossy audio format) of “Smoke on the Water” or the originally recorded digital CD. That’s because most of the information that was thrown away by the conversion was outside of our listening area. Yes some of it was outside of hearing range as well, but most of it is actually inside of what we can hear but don’t usually listen to, specially where there is something more interesting going on.

So what does this all have to do with images and photographs? Well most of the formats that we use are also lossy formats. JPEG is a HUGE lossy format, GIF is even worse. Jpeg actually has 100 levels of lossy. from 1 to 100. 100 being the least lossy, and 1 you won’t recognize your image from the source. The trick with jpeg is to lower the quality enough so that you can’t tell that it was shrunk down — usually between 60-75 (6-7 as some programs refer to the scale).

Formats such as Raw files (CR2[Canon Raw], NRF[Nikon Raw], DNG[Adobe DigitalNegative]) are lossless formats, which means they’re much larger. TIFF and PNG are also two types of lossless formats. Right now everything I shoot is Canon Raw, which is then converted to a DNG for store and archival. I think it’s always better to have 100% of the data in our raw file and in Lightroom it’s breeze to create any size, spec JPEG I need as an output.

It’s a little late for this year, but keep an eye on the LIDS’s (Long Island Dahlia Society) website for their next event.  It’s a simply layout but the colors and types of Dahlia’s that they had were absolutely fantastic.  You can see a bunch of the images that I took with just one off camera flash hand-held on site in the full gallery pages.  I’m sure I’ll be including one or two of them in the main galleries as well.  Oh, it is ‘lord of the flies’ in there, so the visitors get to buy Dahlia’s at the show.  I have no idea if these are the rejects or just extra, but nonetheless they’re fantastic.  I bought two large vases, to do a more controlled set of photos as well.

Here is one from the show:

I’ve been a sports shooter for as long as I can remember, I just like shooting sports.  With that comes certain restrictions.  You can’t always crop your pictures the way everyone else thinks you shoot.  First as a commissioned piece, you have to allow for editorial space.  Second, the publisher (whatever the format it might be) will tell you exactly what size the image should be.   For example, all of the images that I deliver to the Rough Riders for their website has to be 1155×855 pixels, and yes it has to be horizontal images.  That’s because the primary media for the site is their website.  They do also want verticals and standard ratios as well since they do use them for print, but that’s the size of their template for their site.

This is specially true if you move from a cropped sensor to a full frame.  You end up with a lot more room than you’re used to.  After you get used to it, you start cropping less and less, but you still do it.  Also in sports, everything is cropped, because you can’t move.  You have to take the frame that the player develop for you.  If you want that instant you have to click, and crop it later.

All that said, what’s the best crop?  A crop should be to spec, and it should emphasis your subject as much as possible.  Now some people go for the deepest crop they possible can.  I don’t subscribe to this theory.   I think dead space, used properly, can add to your image.  It all depends on what you’re trying to show, and point to.

Since I just got my 1000th person telling me how they lost something because they didn’t have a proper backup, I thought I would point this fact out again.   There really is no excuse.

“Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.”  according to Mozy.com.   You can get a free account which allows you to backup 2GB of data for free.  This can be your bookmarks and misc files.  Obviously you’re not going to backup a great deal of images with 2GB.

Here is athe good news.  They have an unlimited, single machine, option.  Which means you can backup a single machine (all local storage) with a single price — $4.95 per month if you sign a two year agreement.  That’ ~$104.00 for two years of unlimited backups and restores.   You can even restore files remotely.  I’ve been on the road and realized that I needed a file from my workstation.  I’ve initiated a restore to my laptop from the road and gotten last night’s backup.  Oh, did I forget to mention that the backups are in the background and seemless.  They run when you don’t use your machine.  No need to schedule a specific time.  As you getup and go get coffee Mozy figures out what needs to be backed up and backs it up.   They even keep multiple copies of files on their server, in case you need a version of the file from 4 days ago.

I, highly, highly suggest Mozy to everyone.   You can use my referral code, this gives me 128MB added to one of my free accounts for everyone who signs up and actually uses Mozy.  Or you can just sign up without it. Just start using it.

DISCLAIMER: Mozy is now owned by EMC.  I have no direct affiliation with EMC or Mozy.   However I do hold 401K portfolio(s) which at times may hold EMC stock, but they would not be direct holdings and not under my control.

Yeah I know I’m getting out of hand with the music.   I’m sure I’m not the only one that hates American Idol, although I admit, I actually like Kelly Clarkson’s voice, as the show is more of a who can best “show” in every category rather than be really good at one genre.

Ok, way way off topic. Here is Colbie Caillat singing Fallin’ for you.

You can buy MP3s of these songs from Amazon’s MP3 Service.  (Don’t forget to checkout “Green” by Brenden James too)

Here is a very nice (obviously professionally done) video shot on the 7D. I’m very impressed with the low-light footage.

Did anyone know that Canon Made a 85mm f/1.4? Or is that a typo? (UPDATE: As it turns out — it’s an old MF lens)

Shot in 1920 x 1080 at 24p. Transcoded to XDcam codec. Edited in Premiere Pro CS3.

No color grading was utilized. No additional lights were used.

Lenses:

• 16-35 mm 2.8
• 17 mm TS
• 35mm 1.4
• 50 mm 1.4
• 85mm 1.4
• 100 mm 2.8 macro
• 70-200 mm 2.8

I’m very impressed.  The night/low light stuff is virtually clean.