thomas fitzgerald.net

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)

I’ve been playing around with the new adjustments options in Aperture 3 and I’m really impressed. Here’s an example. It’s a pretty bland image to start with.

Note the sky is completely burned out. The recovery slider would only bring it back in so far, but thanks to the new extended range curves adjustment I was able to recover much more of the sky. Here’s the final result after playing around for about half an hour:

I’ve only had a little time to play around with Aperture 3 (as I’m still recovering from a fairly serious illness) but I thought I’d post my first impressions. I had installed the trial version on my laptop and when the boxed version came in the post I put it on my main machine. I should point out that both are about two years old. My laptop is a core2duo 2.4ghz and my desktop is a 24″ iMac 2.4ghz. In no particular order then here are some thoughts on the software:

Aperture 3 is an amazing upgrade. People had begun to worry about the future of the software, as it was two years since the last version came out, but I can see now that they’ve been doing some major work under the hood. I feel silly for doubting Apple’s commitment to the product now. What I find interesting though is that some of the features Apple has chosen to highlight as part of the marketing bumph, namely places and faces, while understandable from a marketing point of view, are not the software’s greatest additions. They really have put a lot of thought into this release and it addresses pretty much all the concerns most people had about it. It more than bridges the gap with Lightroom. There are so many new features though that it can be difficult to get your head around all of them. So then, here are my top ten, in reverse order !

After a two year wait Apple has finally released a new version of Aperture. The release has over 200 new features and I’m still absorbing all the information, but it looks like a great upgrade. It addresses the two biggest concerns people had about the previous version, which were the lack of a curves editor and the lack of adjustment presets. Both of which it now has, but goes one step further by having an “extended range” curves tool which lets you work with the full range of raw data.

Long time readers of this blog may remember that last year I began an expirement of sorts. Being a Canon shooter for years, I was frustrated with the Camera I was using at the time and I wanted to try out a member of the opposition as it were. So I bought a D90 as a way of dipping my toe in the Nikon pool. My previous posts about it are here and here. Anyway, it’s now a year later and I have written about my experiences with the camera over the last year. You can read the full story on my Photography Blog.

I’ve started a “photo a day” project for the new year. Well, I started it on New Year’s day, but I’m only getting around to posting about it here now. I wanted to have a few day’s worth of posts on it before really publicizing it. I tried to do this last year too but it didn’t work out to well. I think I got to day 17 before I gave up. Now that I’m working from home though it should be a bit easier! Anyway, I’ll try to make it interesting so please pay it a visit and subscribe or check back regularly. Thanks

I had my 5D with me when I was home on Christmas Day and took this video of my Sister’s fish tank. It was fairly dark and so I had to shoot at ISO 3200. It came out really well though. Here’s the video and some more details.