timeimmortal

…with the EOS 5D Mark II.

…Canon has finally unveiled the successor to the venerable EOS 5D, the world’s first ‘compact’ full frame digital SLR. The EOS 5D Mark II boasts a new 21MP CMOS sensor, an expanded ISO range of 50-25,600 and a wealth of improvements and new features including full 1080p HD movie recording, live view, 3.0″ 920k dot LCD, DIGIC IV processor, increased battery capacity and sensor dust reduction.

HD movie recording? On an SLR?

Well, people have been asking for it. Oh, who am I kidding: people ask me if my puny (but still pretty cool) EOS 350D can “do movies,” which it can’t. “Movie mode” is what consumers are looking for, even if it makes no sense to put it in a semi-pro camera body.

Oh yeah, the downside of all this awesome:

US: $ 2,699, EU: € 2,499, UK: £ 2,299.

*sigh*

But hey…I can dream, right?

This is a sunrise I captured from the parking lot at work. I tried out a few new Lightroom presets on it, placing the focus of the edits on enhancing the sky. That’s always tricky, because it seems to be the case that in the Canon EOS 350D, digital noise is most prominent in the blue colour channel.

We evidently lost the source graphic for our trade show banner at work, so I had to re-create a high-resolution copy using my EOS 350D and Photoshop the other day. The result you see here is a panoramic (comprised of 7 source images) that was made square only after spending a good twenty minutes playing with the ‘Warp’ tool.

Grace’s sister tries her hand at driving in Vermilion. Here, the light-metering issues of the Lensbaby on the EOS 350D body actually have the opposite effect; parts of the image are underexposed. The Lensbaby’s being inspired by the Holga is rather apparent in a shot like this.

Grace reaches for something unseen as she sits amidst her sisters, friends, and relatives out at the family farm. The hardest part of using the Lensbaby for shots like this is mitigating the overexposure — the EOS 350D always seems to think that less light is getting into the camera than is actually coming in.

BC Ferries apparently has a new class of boat that they have purchased from a company in Germany. Grace and I got a first-hand look at one of the new ships — the Coastal Renaissance.

This is the front viewport of the ship on its top passenger deck (the open one):

Yeah, not much to see — it would have been better had the sky not been so…you know…gray. Still, I do like the lines and reflection visible in this picture, and even the silvery parts of the gray have their appeal. This was intended to be a bit of an odd shot, and it more or less delivered in that regard.

Edit-wise, it was pretty easy to process this picture; the calibration/Punch preset took care of most of the editing for me, and a bit of noise reduction (I don’t know why, but the EOS 350D always seems to have more noise — above what one would expect for a given ISO setting — in the sky and clouds than in the rest of the image; have other users of other camera systems noticed this, or am I imagining things?) rounded things out. I also tweaked the shadows a bit, in an effort to make the image a bit more contrasty.

I tried another shot of the tree in Grace’s grandparents’ back yard on one of the few days during our vacation that we actually got a glimpse of blue skies. The Sun was setting when I took this, and one can discern — through the maze of branches — a fiery orange hue cast upon the upper part of the tree.

Much like the previous shot of this tree that I attempted, this shot was taken with my lens set to its widest possible setting (17 mm), which I prefer to avoid the use of when I can but which, under certain circumstances, can work out for me if I’m careful. Principally, I’m worried about barrel distortion, which on the lens in question can be quite pronounced at its shallowest focal length. Equally, though, the problem of intense chromatic aberration (especially at the borders of the photo) looms large at 17 mm.

And it was the chromatic fringing that I had to adjust for in Lightroom — this eventually required me to reduce the purple and magenta saturations to -100, and even then I don’t think I managed to clean all the offending flared colour out of the picture.

Other edits to this shot included heavier noise reduction, owing to the fact that I was shooting at ISO 800 (which is pretty high on the EOS 350D. I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset as well, to bring out the colour. And I also boosted the green and blue saturations a fair bit. Lastly, the sky required some fairly hefty highlight reduction. In spite of all the tweaking that had to be done, though, the picture itself turned out really well, for which I’m grateful.