Cowboy and Aliens – Behind the Scene with Timothy White

Couldn’t embed the video in the blogpost so you’d have to hop over to vimeo to watch this awesome video.

Lately I’m seeing more and more reviews/comparisons/discussions between Canon 5DIII and Nikon D800. My conclusion, after reading a few reviews, is that both cameras are excellent. Both will take great pictures and provide improvement over their predecessors. The 5DIII beats the D800 at some things, and the D800 beats the 5DIII at some things. You simply can’t go wrong with either camera. What I find extremely annoying is that some Canon or Nikon fanboys would simply defend their respective brands to no tomorrow. Last time I checked, photography is an art and camera body is simply a tool. Yes having an expensive camera body and an expensive lens may give you a higher probability of taking a good picture but you don’t need the best of the best to produce a good picture.

Just a random rant.

For this particular shot, I walked around False Creek seawall just before sunset, found a good spot, and snapped a series of 16 pictures for this panorama shot below using the Canon 35L.

Once I got home I loaded the pictures into Lightroom and applied the landscape preset that I created on the 1st picture in the series. I took a quick look at the 1st picture and found it turned out very well. I was satisfied so I selected all 16 pictures and hit “sync.” The same preset was applied for all 16 pictures. Once this was done I output the pictures and stitched them using AutoPano Pro. If your’e into panorama and you don’t have AutoPano Pro I’d highly recommend you getting it. It’s an awesome program.

A few minor adjustments in AutoPano Pro later I ended up with the picture above. Simple & easy.

First is the Home Depot homebrew Profoto globe. The Profoto (some might misspell it as Prophoto hehe) globe is a pretty neat light modifier that makes your strobe a 360 degree light source. If you have watched Joey Lawrence’s latest DVD you’ll notice that he used this light modifier at one of his location shoots. This particular light modifier gives a very interesting light and it’s super cool to use. This mod is quite neat since it only costs about $10.

The second mod is to improve your Pocket Wizard performance. Not only you’ll see an improve radio performance it also makes it easier to mount your radio trigger. This is a brilliant idea!

Heisler’s picture from the shootout really caught my attention. Just as someone would expect from a MASTER photographer, Heisler thought about the picture for 5 minutes and didn’t take his first frame until 18 minutes into the shootout. What’s even more amazing is the fact that he only needed 1 frame to create the image.

It was also pretty neat to see Martin Prihoda in the video, whom I had the pleasure to meet last year in Vancouver. He’s one amazing photographer and really cool dude! Hopefully one of these days I’ll able to take his Big Light Far Away workshop.

Since I started shooting food photography for Three More Bites I find myself flipping through an increasing number of cookbooks, to get ideas of how to shoot food items. Here are some shots that I’ve done recently.

If you have time please check out Three More Bites. I hope to see you there.

In case you haven’t heard about the announcement (do you live in a cave or something? :p) here’s a quick run down of the 5DIII specs:

• 22.3 MP full frame sensor
• 14 bits RAW
• Digic 5+ image processor
• 6 fps
• Dual CF and SD memory card slots
• 100% coverage view finder
• ISO 50 – 102400
• 61 point AF system
• In-camera HDR
• 3.2″ clear view high resolution LCD
• Full HD 1080/30p and 720/60p Formats
• Built-In HDR and Multiple Exposure Modes

You can get this brand spanking new camera for $3500 US.

I was quite excited to see all the specs. Canon hit everything on my wish list. Mind you, I only had 2 items on my list so it wasn’t exactly hard to satisfy me. I was quite pleased to see that Canon has decided to stick with 22 MP, same as the 5DII.  The ISO performance appears to be about 2 stops better than the 5DII. This is pretty impressive considering 5DII is already pretty clean to begin with.

After the announcement, the overwhelming question I’ve been hearing is…. Does it make sense to upgrade my existing camera to 5DIII?

Let’s look at the specs listed above one by one…

• 22.3 MP full frame sensor -> Love it. No need to upgrade the computer due to lack of processing power
• 14 bits RAW -> Pretty standard with new cameras
• Digic 5+ image processor -> Same as above
• 6 fps -> Huge improvement if you’re planning to shoot sports.
• Dual CF and SD memory card slots -> Useful if you’re shooting video.
• 100% coverage view finder -> Love it!
• ISO 50 – 102400 -> Higher ISO & cleaner high ISO images are awesome but you’re not a bat, why are you shooting in completely darkness?
• 61-points AF system -> Love it!
• In-camera HDR -> Yawn, why let the camera think for you when you can do HDR in post?
• 3.2″ clear view high resolution LCD -> Good if you chimp all the time.
• Full HD 1080/30p and 720/60p Formats -> Great if you’re shooting video.
• Multiple Exposure Modes -> This can be useful if you’re doing HDR a lot.

For my style of shooting, portraiture, I rarely shoot at high ISO. Usually, the highest I shoot is 1600 ISO which means I’m covering some sort of events in poor lit condition. In this case I usually would have a flash with me and I’m more than comfortable using the flash and bouncing light off the wall or ceiling. 6 fps is pretty useless for portraiture. If you shoot that fast chances are you’ll fry your strobe/flash first. Second, I rarely shoot sports so the 6 fps is not much of a use for me. I don’t shoot video so while the dual memory slots and video capability look great, I doubt I’ll utilize them. The 3.2″ LCD is pretty nice but if you’re shooting at the level that you can justify buying a full-frame camera, you shouldn’t be chimping! Sure the occasional look at the LCD is useful but you shouldn’t be using your LCD to judge if that was a good picture or not. Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a film camera and practice. Or just tape over the LCD for a month so you can learn how to expose properly. The in-camera HDR is nice, if you’re lazy like Homer Simpson! Why let your camera do HDR when you can most likely do a better job in post? Do you really think that the Canon engineers know exactly what you want to see in an HDR picture?

After a long look at the specs, the only really useful thing to me is the improved AF system. Don’t get me wrong I think Canon really hit the ball out of the park with the 5DIII announce. However the price is way too high! To me, at $3500 for the camera body, I’m basically paying Canon the extra $1500 for a new 61-points AF system. If I was considering getting the newly announced 24-70 II, I’d be looking at spending over $5500 just on the camera body and one single lens! I know, we can just charge clients 20% more to cover my cost. Now try to explain that one to your clients and see if they’ll go for that. Let me know if you have any success.

For me, I won’t be getting the 5DIII anytime soon. I’d rather spend the money on a better lighting system. After all, photography is all about capturing light! What’s your opinion? I’d love hearing yours too!