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Canon 5D Mark II “Cinema” Firmware now Available

by thomasfitzgerald on 16. Mar, 2010 in Photography, Technology

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.

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Hands on with the New Aperture 3 Adjustments

by thomasfitzgerald on 17. Feb, 2010 in Aperture, Apple, Photography, Technology

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.

House-Original

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:

House AP3

I used multiple instances of adjustments and lots of brushing to get this result. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s far more interesting than the original. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I did. I’ve put a screenshot of the full adjustments panel and if you click through you can see it full res. As you can see, I added lots and lots of adjustments to try and push it. It never slowed down or crashed on me, and remained very responsive despite stacking on more and more.

The first thing I did was add a black and white adjustment. I didn’t really touch the settings on this, as it was fine for what I wanted. I then added an extended range curves adjustment and recovered more of the sky. I also darkened it down a bit. As it was darkening the whole Image I chose to paint the curves in and painted over the sky with a large soft edge brush.

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First Impressions of Aperture 3

by thomasfitzgerald on 16. Feb, 2010 in Aperture, Apple, Photography

09aperture3_iceberg.jpg

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:

Performance seems to have been much improved since the previous version overall. They seem to have implemented a tiling system, where as a low res version is loaded first and adjustments are made to that, and then if you choose to zoom in a higher res version is generated. It speeds up performance in general, but if it’s doing anything in the background it can take a little while to generate the full res version which can be a bit of a pain.

The whole interface looks like it’s been redone. Everything looks much more polished than the previous version. Icons are much clearer and text is more readable. There are some really nice features in fullscreen mode too. If you are making adjustments you can hold down the shift key (I think it was the shift key) and the rest of the adjustment hud fades out so you’re left with just the adjustment you’re working on. One cool thing they’ve added is the ability to see a focus point overlay. This basically shows your cameras focus points and highlights the one that was selected when you took the picture.

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Top 10 New Features of Aperture 3

by thomasfitzgerald on 10. Feb, 2010 in Aperture, Apple, Photography, Software

09aperture3_hero.jpg

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 !

10. Support for sRaw and mRaw

Owners of Canon’s DSLRs can now use the reduced size RAW format with Aperture. This has long been a bone of contention, as Lightroom had supported this feature. If you own a Canon DSLR with a high megapixel count, now you too can shoot at half the resolution, just the way your Camera manufacturer intended.

9. Import GPS Data from iPhone Photos

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Apple Finally Releases Aperture 3

by thomasfitzgerald on 09. Feb, 2010 in Aperture, Apple, Mac, Photography

aperturebox.pngAfter 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.

There are tons of other great new features in it including some excellent GPS logging tools, a great new mobile workflow with the ability to sync libraries between a laptop and desktop, a very high end slideshow tool which can work with video as well as stills and audio. I’ll write a more detailed post when I get more time but for the moment Macworld has a good write up. Also, check out some of the Aperture in Action videos on Apple’s website. Oh, and so much for that Apertuere X Rumour. Told you so.

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My Nikon D90 Experiment One Year On

My Nikon D90 Experiment One Year On

by thomasfitzgerald on 11. Jan, 2010 in Photography, Technology

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.

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TwentyTen365

TwentyTen365

by thomasfitzgerald on 06. Jan, 2010 in Photography, Site News

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

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Fish Tank at ISO 3200

by thomasfitzgerald on 28. Dec, 2009 in Photography

fishtank

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.

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