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Rangefinder
Magazine Digital Photography by John Rettie
I have just returned from a two week trip to New Zealand, where I was covering a couple of motorsports events (a round of the World Rally Championship and the Race to the Sky hill climb) and road testing a truck (Holden Ute). During the time I was there I shot over 1900 photographs on a brand new Canon EOS 10D. Hopefully, you will get to read my full review in an upcoming issue. Although I have not yet studied the images I captured closely, they appear to be of great quality. I did not need to do any adjustments before sending several images for use on the Speed TV web site. Autofocusing seems to be far better than on the D60, although there were times it hunted on dusty images. I missed a few shots early on when I underestimated the time it took for the camera to wake up from its sleep mode. Once I learned to keep “tickling” the shutter button, all was fine. Despite being covered in dust and rain, the camera performed faultlessly except for one time when it froze and an “ERR 1” warning flashed on the screen. According to the instruction manual this meant there was a poor contact between the body and lens. Sure enough, taking off the lens and remounting it solved the problem. I was upset to find that within a few days of admittedly tough use the LCD screen became quite badly scratched from the dust and grit that landed on the camera as the rally cars raced by at speed. There’s nothing that can be done about it as Canon elected not to provide any way of attaching a cover. My old Nikon D1 still has a scratch-free screen thanks to the transparent Hoodman cover attached to it. The cover is scratched, of course, but that can easily be replaced for a few bucks. It was interesting to see that the vast majority of professional photographers covering the World Rally Championship were using digital cameras. Even a couple of photographers I know who were still reluctant to switch a few months ago have now taken the plunge and in both cases they say it has proved more than worthwhile. One knew he’d save a lot of money in film and processing costs but has been amazed at how much postage costs have been cut as he now e-mails images to clients all over the world, instead of sending prints or slides. As I eyed other photographer’s camera equipment, I estimated that the usage of Canon and Nikon digital cameras was about 50/50. Apart from some journalists using point-and-shoot digital cameras, there were no cameras in evidence from other manufacturers, even among film users. If other manufacturers introduce professional-level digital cameras that can produce identical or better quality images, it will take an enormous amount of marketing clout or a phenomenal shift in quality or return on investment to change the status quo. This leads to my thoughts on a significant camera I tried out for a few days before my trip.
Sigma
SD9 Sigma is the first camera manufacturer to introduce a digital body with this chip. I was hoping that the results would be so phenomenal, that I would have no hesitation in suggesting it might be worthwhile to invest in a Sigma system just to gain the advantage of using this chip. However, I’m afraid that’s not the case, in my opinion. First of all, the camera body does not feel as robust as an equivalent Nikon or Canon. Lens quality obviously varies from one lens to another as Sigma produces a large range of lenses covering different price bands and some of them are rated quite highly. One thing about the SD9 that I really do like is the viewfinder. It shows 130 percent of a full frame with the parts of the image not captured marked off and grayed out. I wear glasses and I find that most of the time I cannot see the whole viewfinder frame very easily. With the Sigma, one can quickly see beyond the actual image area being captured and as long as one remembers to “crop” the picture in the correct masked area it’s an added benefit. It would be a boon on other digital cameras that do not use a full frame, as their viewfinders are less “bright” than in a regular 35mm SLR camera. On the digital side, I would have to say that it is a work in progress. Sigma likes to say the camera has 10.2 million photo detectors but it really only has 3.4 million effective pixels, although each one can capture all three RGB colors as there are three layers. The chip is physically smaller than in most DSLR camera bodies so it has a 1.7X multiplier effect and produces an image of 2263x1512 pixels. At the basic ISO 100 setting, images captured under ideal lighting conditions are crisp with good colors. But at 400 ISO there is a large amount of noise readily apparent. I know this only too well, as I accidentally shot some pictures of a car for a magazine at 400 ISO and it took a lot of Photoshop work to get an acceptable noise-free shot. One of the most annoying features at the time of review was that one could only capture images in raw mode, as there is no jpeg processing in the camera. For me this is a trying chore as it means one has to wait 30 seconds for each image to be processed (on a dual 450MHz G4 Mac) before they can be viewed or accessed by other programs such as Graphic Converter, Photo Mechanic or Photoshop. An annoying bug in the Mac OS X version of the software also changed the modification date on almost every folder on my computer each time it was opened. Sigma is aware of this bug so it may have been fixed by now, but it was too late for me. I’d have to opine that if Foveon has any hope of marketing its image capture chip it will have to persuade a major manufacturer to implement it. If it really is as good as advertised that will surely happen. If it is not quite the leap forward in quality that’s been claimed, it will remain a niche product. I guess only time will tell, but at least it’s going to ensure other manufacturers invest heavily in R&D for the continuing quest for the ultimate image capture device.
Kingston
DataPak PC Card Hard Drive I downloaded images to my laptop each night and quickly checked image quality. My current laptop does not have a CD burner and I did not want to lug around an external burner. I was loath to trust all my images on the laptop’s built-in hard drive. My solution was to use a Kingston DataPak PC Card portable hard drive with a capacity of 5GB. It’s a Type II card, which means it is only 5mm thick. Most laptop computers have room for two Type II cards so it’s possible to transfer images straight from a CompactFlash card in an adaptor in one slot onto the DataPak card in the other slot. My workflow solution was to copy the image
folders from the camera using a PC card adaptor onto the computer first.
Then I would transfer the
folders onto the PC Card drive in the second PC Card slot on the laptop.
In this way, I had two copies of the files for safety. Once I got back
to my home office it was easy to transfer all the contents on the PC
Card drive via a Datachute card reader on my PC and then move them to
my Mac via Ethernet, so ensuring I had another two copies. Eventually
I will burn a DVD-R disc containing most of the 5GB of content of images.
Quick Book Review Beginner’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop by Michelle Perkins (124 pages, $29.95) is an ideal book for someone just learning the complicated program. It starts by explaining resolution and goes on from there, gradually introducing new concepts and explaining how they work. Photo Retouching with Adobe Photoshop by Gwen Lute (125 pages, $29.95) describes in detail chapter by chapter how to restore old photographs, improve skin tone on a face, change backgrounds, add missing people to a picture and a myriad of other techniques. As with the previous title, this book is written by a photographer for photographers. Professional Digital Portrait Photography by Jeff Smith (122 pages, $29.95) is aimed at photographers who are planning on converting to a digital workflow for their studio. It’s very much written from the author’s personal experience as he successfully switched to digital. He describes what is needed to set up a digital studio and explains different techniques compared to film, both for capture and output. John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 33 years, a computer for 23 years, and has combined his knowledge of both for the past ten years. Readers can contact him by e-mail at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder.
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