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The Photo Video Guy Podcast is created for photographic and videographic enthusiasts featuring news, reviews, tips and tricks and is the audio companion to thephotovideoguy.ca and thephotovideoguy.com web sites. This Episode
Nikon's Q3 Financials Sony's Financials AVID Studio for iPad Fuji X Pro 1 Pricing Canon EOS Utility FINALLY OS X Lion Ready Lexar intros new CF cards Apple Updates FCP X New Lumix TS4 REVIEW : Metz 58 AF-2
Thanks for listening! The Photo Video Guy Podcast is created for photographic and videographic enthusiasts featuring news, reviews, tips and tricks and is the audio companion to thephotovideoguy.ca and thephotovideoguy.com web sites.
This Episode
More Canon 5D Mk III News on the Nikon D700 Lego Man goes to space Snapseed Kelby and the D4 Adobe CS6 policy change New smartphone sensors Leica guesses Really big lenses M43 lenses Nikon 1 reviews Conurus adapter TriGrip review
Full Disclosure : I am not employed by Nik Software. I do not receive any compensation from Nik Software. Nik Software does not have a clue who the heck I am, other than having accepted my money for their products.
I'm a known champion of Snapseed on the iPad. It just rocks. So imagine how excited I was to discover that as of January 12, 2012, that the amazing Snapseed is now available on the Mac.
Nik has done a really fine job of taking the gesture oriented iPad app and transposing it to the mouse/trackpad interaction model of the Macintosh. The software runs on OS X 10.6.6 or later and OS X 10.7.2 or later and the app size is about 28mb. You'll need a 64 bit CPU and Core 2 Duo or greater capability. Oh yeah, you'll also need $19.99 at the Mac App Store.
For those who have suffered without Snapseed, here's a short summary of what it brings to you.
Basic services include cropping, rotation, straightening and the ability to quickly select standard aspect ratios. You can also correct white balance, saturation, contrast and overall ambience. For those who have used Nik's most awesome plugins, Snapseed also features Nik's powerful control points so you can exercise highly selective control over what sections of your image get edited.
Once you've done the basics, you'll want to look at some of the extra options. None of these capabilities are trivial and you really want to get in there and play around, but for the short list you have Black&White, Vintage Film and Drama. Want that grunge look? Try out the Grunge functions. Have some buildings falling over? Try the Tilt and Shift (SO AMAZING BECAUSE IT'S SO SIMPLE) and fix them right up.
Want to pull out more detail? Nik has brought their Structure control over from their plugins and of course there is powerfully simple sharpening as well. Like that Bokeh look? Choose centre focus. Want to put a cool frame around your image? Try out Organic Frames.
Once you've finished your work, share your photos via email or on to Facebook or Flickr.
Oh yeah, it works with JPEGs, TIF, and RAW files! And it's under $20
The following images are from Nik's page on the App Store
Thanks for listening! The Photo Video Guy Podcast is created for photographic and videographic enthusiasts featuring news, reviews, tips and tricks and is the audio companion to thephotovideoguy.ca and thephotovideoguy.com web sites.
This Episode
Kodak Update Nikon Rumours Canon G1X Lightroom 4 Beta Canon Lens Rumour Fuji X Series Lenses REVIEW : Pocket Wizard Flex TT5 Book Recommendation : Photographer's Survival Guide
Is now available
I am very happy to announce that the nice folks at iTunes have accepted my podcast for distribution through the iTunes Store. The link to it is http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast//id493184154 and hopes are that it will begin to reveal itself in searches by the 9th of January 2012. If you are so inclined, please subscribe. The intent is for weekly episodes and I will be happy to take questions via email or comment to the site from readers and listeners. Thanks to all for your support!
With CES imminent, expectations are high around announcements from the major vendors and with the success in 2011 of both the X100 (yuck) and the X10 (also yuck) Fuji is one of those major vendors. Smart marketers those Fujians, getting their press releases out BEFORE the avalanche of releases that is CES. And Fuji did not disappoint. Well except for me. Here's the text from the overlay release; and the links should be hot, unless I screwed up the post. FUJIFILM Corporation (President and CEO: Shigetaka Komori) is delighted to announce the new lineups of the FinePix digital camera series. The wide range of new FinePix lineups will provide customers even more convenient solution from capturing to sharing, professional to simple point and shoot, and satisfy and amaze all customers around the world with their exciting photography life.
The new cameras will be showcased at 2012 The International CES, Las Vegas, USA.
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That's a long list of cameras. I had prior info about the SuperZooms and they make sense given the success in the holiday season of Nikon's P500 and Canon's 40xs is. But, if I were a buyer for a camera store chain, I'd be filling the coffee mug with straight Lagavulin since it is clear that no one at Fuji has studied anything about the problems created by too much choice. Looking at the list, I think of Lowe bags. There are so many too choose from, buyers end up choosing none, or one that's not right. Harvard Business School has done numerous studies on this "Too Much Choice" issue but plainly manufacturers in the photo industry are not paying attention. Thus camera stores have buckets of inventory of products so close to each other from a single vendor that no one can readily tell them apart. You'll note that Leica does not make this mistake and you'll also note that there are no M lenses to be found and that Leica sees fit to raise prices because of demand.
What did Fuji not announce? Where is the X Pro, the interchangeable lens CDSLR/EVIL/Mirrorless/MILF that has been rumoured and of which photos already exist. If, as Trey Ratcliff proposes, the future is not the DSLR, then the X Pro fits that niche and certainly there is space above the X100 and below the M9 for serious enthusiasts. C'mon Fuji, get the lead out and get that new camera out. As for the rest of your announcements, I'm sure that they are all really fine products, but frankly I'm bored and underwhelmed. What is it the cool kids say? Oh yeah. Meh.
Yes, I know I am posting this on Christmas eve, and yes I know that the app is really an ad package for Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, and yes I know you'll get bored soon enough, but for a short time, you are going to go nuts dropping a car on stuff and blowing stuff up with a missile.
From JJ Abrams' team at Bad Robot comes Action Movie FX, a FREE iPhone app that let's you, well, blow stuff up. Fun? Wow!
Get the app at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/action-movie-fx/id489321253?mt=8
Do It!
You may have heard this story but I think it is so awesome, I want to share it with readers.
A user of a Canon 1000D lost his camera overboard into the ocean off Vancouver. Fourteen months later, a scuba diver discovered the camera while on a dive. Now this diver is a complete class act as he not only raised the camera, he pulled the SD card (a Sandisk Extreme III) from the camera, let it dry out and cleaned it and then tried to read the card. To his surprise there were photos on the card. So he loaded them up on Google in the hope that this might help identify the owner.
The Google folks helped out and the original owner was reunited with the camera and the pictures! That is just so cool!.
Awesome shout outs to the diver, to Google and to the nice folks at Sandisk whose product survived over a year's immersion in salt water and still was able to be used to recover the pictures.
Great news! There are now more issues of the awesome Light It magazine for the iPad now available with Issue 4 to follow by year end. For those who got excited by the superb first issue and then wondered what happened, there was a delay in getting the app approved by Apple, but that's all done now and the issues are available. At $2.99 an issue, I'm not sure there is a better and more beautifully constructed way to learn about lighting.
If you don't have the app, go get it. If you don't have an iPad, now you have a great reason to get one and to call it "education expense".
The Sony NEX-7 is very skinny on the ground given the horrible flooding in Thailand. My contact at Sony fears that stores won't be seeing new gear until February at the earliest. The folks at Leica explain the absence of pretty much every one of their M lenses on "market demand". Why? Because folks are buying newer mirror less cameras and Leica adapters to use M lenses.
No doubt about the quality of the Leica glass, but what happens when you put Leica glass on the hot new NEX-7? The people at Luminous Landscape have done it in a multi-part assessment. Follow the link to read the article 15 December, 2011 - NEX-7 vs. Leica M9 Resolution
Must be the season but a lot of people have been asking me where to get those glasses and mugs that look like lenses. There is the Nikon shot glass, and the Canon mugs that look like L series zooms.
The place to go is Photojojo's online store. Go check it out, they have some wicked cool and full geek on gear!
Nikon has released a firmware update for the J1 and V1 cameras in preparation for the release of the FT1 adapter. The FT1 allows the mounting of Nikon F mount lenses on the new small sensor cameras that despite the mcmarketing are not actually CDSLRs where C is compact. They are more like CARFs but that's a different rant.
Adobe has released updates for Lightroom and Camera Raw. Lightroom 3.6 is available for download now as is Adobe Camera Raw 6.6 Keep your software up to date!
I took some time to do a quick review of a couple of products over the last couple of days.
The first is the Easy-Go Speedlite Reflector and mount. I tried the unit with a 580 EX II, a Metz MB58 AF-2 and a Sigma DG Super. To my disappointment, the unit does something that completely screws up the eTTL measurements resulting in underexposure by on average three stops. Since each flash works fine on a variety of bodies in eTTL without the reflector, and multiple bodies and multiple flashes produce underexposed shots with the reflector, I have to say it's the reflector. So, save the $60 for the reflector and mount and get a collapsible Gary Fong light dome. It works flawlessly, gives wonderful soft light and doesn't mess up the eTTL flash. The Easy-Go stuff feels cheap and earns 0 stars.
I also took time to check out the King eTTL Flash transmitter and receiver kit from Pixel Enterprise. It's basically a clone of the acclaimed Pocket Wizard eTTL controllers. There is a designated transmitter and receiver. Both use two AA batteries. The radio control is simple and effective and eTTL exposures are excellent. The system offers three channels and three zones. I won't be dumping my collection of Pocket Wizards, but if all you need is radio controlled remote eTTL solution for a single flash this kit is relatively inexpensive and works well. And, since it is radio and not Infrared, it will work outside and in situations where there are other photographers discharging flash. 3 stars out of 5.
I tend to use studio flash in the studio, but sometimes a location shoot doesn't need 1000ws or bags of heavy kit. I love my PocketWizard TT1 and TT5 units because I can simply get wireless TTL flash going with my Canon DSLRs. This simplifies the use of speedlite driven modifiers because I don't have to worry about flash splitters and the inconsistent function of IR based remote flash. This past fall, Westcott released a series of modifiers designed to be lightweight, portable and to work with hot shoe based flashguns.
The Canon 580 EX II is a fine unit, although my preference are Metz 58 AF-2 units. In either case they do the full eTTL thing readily. Stringing cables is a pain and IR triggers don't always work when the flash is inside a box.
Setting up either the Orb or the Striplight is a piece of cake. The kit includes a solid stand, a flash mount with tilt and umbrella mount, and the appropriate soft box and front scrim. Simply erect the stand, and attach the flash mount. Open the soft box, just like an umbrella and mount it to the stand. Place your flash on the mount using whatever trigger you like, orienting the flash to fire into the box. Put the scrim on using the velcro tabs. That's it!.
The boxes are constructed with zipped sections to allow the stand to pass through the side of the box. The orb is an octabox style and the strip light is a tall narrow style. The Orb has one opening, the strip has two, for portrait and landscape orientations.
Using the Pocket Wizards, you maintain full eTTL flash capability and by adding the AC3 zone controller you can set multiple zones through the pocket wizards avoiding the need to use Canon's zone system that is dependent upon infrared.
Great exposures are a snap and with proper light placement you can get beautifully soft light where the flash is the dominant source or even outside as supporting light. The really nice thing about the Westcott kits is how compact they are. You could carry four of them in a generic gym bag from Walmart.
Of course you can use cabled connections for your TTL flashes if you so desire, although I avoid this due to the probability I will knock something expensive over when I trip on the cable.
Both Westcott kits retail for under $200 and you can sometimes find them on sale. For the money, they are really well built, provide wonderful soft light and help you get more from your hot shoe flash.
Pictured are the Apollo Orb and the Apollo Strip Speedlite kits
Highly Recommended
A photographer can always benefit from great gear, but great gear does not a great photographer make. So it has been said often. It's also said that a camera is just a tool to facilitate the making of images. Yup I agree. But. Take the little Leica X1 in hand, and you might start to think that this camera will make you a better photographer.. There IS something about a Leica. Let's start at the beginning.
I have wanted a Leica rangefinder for years, but other priorities have always come first. And, reality bites, but those other priorities still do. I don't need a rangefinder. I have excellent cameras already, be they of the 35mm variety or medium format. I stopped shooting in the mid eighties and came back with the advent of good digital came back ten years ago Back in the eighties, through the kindness of a friend by name of Victor Grape, I was able to shoot for myself and on some jobs with a Leica M4-P with motor winder and a 35mm lens. It was brilliant then, and I have since wanted that feeling again
I've looked around at used M8, M8.2 and M9 digital rangefinders, but timing is not good. I've just had the opportunity to spend some quality time with the X1 and I am seriously impressed.
Many folks talk about how Apple starts the experience with incredible packaging. Well Apple could be looking to Leica for tips. The X1 arrives in a simple, large silver box with a black rectangle holding a wireframe of the X1 in white. Pull the tab and lift the lid, and unlike other boxes it falls away to the rear. So do the front and the sides revealing what looks like a black jewelry box. Lifting the hinged top reveals a grey box with the Leica logo in the top corner. The box is heavy card with a subtle pinstripe. The front panel of the box swings down revealing two drawers. The top drawer holds the manuals, and unlike the manuals for most every fixed lens autofocus, these are beautifully printed, extremely complete and easy to read. The bottom drawer holds cables, a pouch, strap and the power adapter with international slide on tips and of course the battery. There has been criticism that the power adapter doesn't have fold away prongs, but this is an American conceit since the prongs for the UK are so sizeable, they won't be folding anywhere. Rather than force the owner to source plug adapters when travelling, Leica has you covered.
Upon opening the small grey box, the X1 s revealed cradled in foam. It looks like the M9 with clean simple lines, minus the viewfinder of course. Given the substantial weight of the complete package the weight of the X1 is a surprise, particularly if you have handled the M9. It is refreshingly lightweight and fits the hand very well.
Installing the battery and SDHC card is pretty much the same process as with any compact camera although the latch required more deliberate action. You won't be opening the battery door by accident. Many compact cameras have a ring around the shutter release that controls zoom. In the case of the X1 it offers single shot, continuous (2fps Jpeg only) and self timer. The dial on the right controls aperture offering A for automatic settings, plus the range from f2.8 to f16 on the 24mm Elmarit lens. Unlike the majority of compacts, the X1 uses an APS-C sized sensor, so that 24mm lens provides a field of view like a 35mm on a 35mm film camera. This is the classic rangefinder focal length.
The dial to the left is the shutter speed selector with A for automatic and a range of 1/2000 to 1 second. There is no bulb option. When the shutter dial and aperture dial are set to A, the camera operates in fully automatic exposure mode. Placing the shutter dial in A and manipulating the aperture setting gives you aperture preferred. Setting the aperture dial to A and manipulating the shutter speed dial gives you shutter speed preferred. Manipulating both dials off auto gives you full manual. There is a hot shoe with pinouts for Leica flashes. On the left is a circular raised area that acts as the release and enclosure for the built in flash. The flash is small and not particularly powerful but gets the job done when needed. The camera sports an ISO range from 100 to 3200 with excellent noise control as well as auto ISO for those who like that sort of thing.
The front panel holds the lens, which extends when powered on (you must remove the cap when turning the camera on), the Leica logo and a small LED that provides focus assist. The right side holds an elegant door that provides access to the USB port and the mini HDMI connection. Beside the battery door on the bottom is a standard ¼-20 tripod fitting
The rear of the camera holds a bright LCD display with 230k dots. This is much less than the density found on other cameras, but in practical use, it is more than sufficient to check images or use the menus. There is a rotary wheel upper right to be used for manual focus and this is much more intuitive than you might originally think. Below it is the popular four way rocker/wheel/button arrangement. The centre button activates the menu system and acts as the Ok button. Top is exposure compensation labeled EV+-. Right is for flash settings. There are Auto, Auto w Red Eye, Forced On, Forced On with Red Eye, Slow Sync, Slow Sync with Red Eye and Studio. The last option enables the flash to fire just enough to trigger studio strobes. While I would not have gone looking for this in a compact camera of pocket size, I was very pleased to discover it. Kind of fun to have this tiny creature trigger all my strobes. Bottom allows you to select AF, AF with macro and MF or manual focus. The left button selects between 2s and 12s for the self timer but only acts if the switch on the camera top is set for self timer.
Left of the screen are five buttons. The are Play, Focus/Delete, WB, ISO and Info. They do what you expect them to do. I liked the focus selection allowing you to move quickly from spot focus to 11 zones including high speed modes very simply. Initial releases of the camera provoked anger with the speed of focus found in the 1.x versions of the firmware. My unit has the current v2.0 firmware and while not screaming fast, it's quick enough but tends to hunt in low light as it is contrast based. If your intent is to use this camera for fast action, it's not the right choice for you. The manual focus option does provide a scale on the display so you can preset a hyper focal distance focus model by aperture. I miss this on most digital cameras and it does simplify street shooting. Couple this with a nearly silent shutter release and it's really just brilliant.
The X1 is assembled from components in Germany by Leica. So it's not some stuck together thing from somewhere with the Leica logo stuck on.
The big draw of the camera is the Elmarit 24/2.8 lens. While some folks stroke out at the cost of the X1 ($2100 CDN at time of writing) this is still less than the 24/2.8 Elmarit for the M9. So it's not the same piece of glass but it is, in my use, the sharpest and most accurate piece of glass on any compact or micro four thirds camera I have ever tried. Since I work part time in a camera store, I get opportunity to try out lots of kit, and this lens is just marvelous. I did specific comparisons with the 20mm lens on the Lumix GF-1 I have had for a while and there really is no comparison. The Lumix lens is very good. Until you compare it to the Leica. The Leica's incredible tonal range and colour fidelity makes the otherwise very good Panasonic glass look like it came off the bottom of a Coke bottle.
In my use I have shot at a variety of ISO settings and am very impressed with the quality at high ISO settings. The auto white balance is decent but not perfect, although under studio CFLs rated at 5500K, it performed very well and a corrected image made of the Colorchecker Passport was indistinguishable from the automatic setting.
One thing that is a niggling annoyance is that the camera can capture in Jpeg and Jpeg Fine, or add DNG images as well. There is no option for DNG on its own, which takes up space unnecessarily for me as I make the habit to shoot everything in RAW. Not a big deal. When you register the camera with Leica, you get a download of Adobe Lightroom so handling the files is a piece of cake. I particularly like Leica's decision to go with the open DNG format for its RAW storage.
The menu system should be seen by all other digital camera manufacturers, particularly, oh EVERY point and shoot vendor. unlike the multicoloured, multilayered, designed by the psychotic menu systems found in other cameras, there is ONE layer to the X1 menu. It is four screens long. You simply scroll and then click. Twice. No more than that. Brilliant.
Pros
Incredibile lens, great menu system, silent use, awesome add-on optical finder, innovative popup flash, tough construction
Cons
Expensive.
I give it five out of five.
I was lucky enough to see a detailed presentation on this new super zoom sub DSLR that got tacked on to a presentation on the X10, which as readers know, left me underwhelmed. The X-S1's numbers are pretty incredible and it has an enormous zoom range of 28-624mm on a 2/3 inch Fujifilm EXR sensor. The real test will be a hands-on but Fuji MIGHT be on track to rejuvenate the near dead super-zoom fixed lens mirror less marketplace.
Yesterday was my first visit to one of the KelbyLive seminars and with a single exception it was superb. I credit the Kelby team for keeping to the timeline, staying on track and delivering exactly what they committed to deliver. Some felt that they did not get what they expected, however, rereading the ad after the fact, Mr. Cross in fact delivered the goods. He was interesting, his topics useful and he kept the day upbeat. He took time to credit Adobe for great things and to knife them frequently for awkwardly named items and buttons and regularly chastised them for their intent to make features "discoverable". I am no Photoshop expert, but I would not use the adjective "discoverable" either, finding "obtuse" and "concealed" far more accurate. Those bits aside, it was reinforced that the product I have been a licensee of for years has much more depth than I have ever encountered. As Mr. Cross pointed out, if one is self-taught on something new, one has an idiot for a teacher. The number of topics covered was rich without being numbing and they weren't dumbed down to stuff quantity over quality.
Mr. Cross is both a consummate teacher and presenter. The two don't always go together and the combination allows Mr. Cross to bond with his audience quickly. There was always a lineup to ask questions on the breaks and to his credit, Mr. Cross answered clearly without rambling and was very clear when he did not know something, which to my observation only occurred when questions were raised about topics he forewarned he knew nothing about.
The audience was more heavily populated with design professionals over photographers in my observation. Since I am a photographer with an acknowledged lack of design training, this concerned me at first but every topic was consumable by me, and only one, that of "Type" was not completely new. I suspect that this was not consistent for all attendees, but feedback on the escalators heading out was unanimously positive.
The venue was a large room, but was still oversubscribed, with good temps, lighting and audio. One guest complained to me that she could not hear Mr. Cross, but that was due to a severe case of "repeat what Dave said" or yell "yes" Turrets syndrome infecting the person sitting beside her. Duct tape should be available to silence those who cannot shut up.
My only complaint is around the venue. Kelby could have let everyone know which building of the Convention Centre the session was being held in. This would have simplified entry and egress for those attendees who could not take public transit to attend. In fact, as much as I enjoyed the session, I'm not sure I would attend another one if held at the Toronto Convention Centre. Toronto roads are consistently plugged solid with traffic, road repair, illegal parking, horrible drivers, delivery trucks and the like. My drive to the centre is 45 kilometres one way but it took 2 hours to get there in the morning and over 2.5 hours to get home at night. I would also recommend starting at 0930 instead of 1000 and ending at 1630 instead of 1700 to ease some of the traffic pain.
Should you have opportunity to attend a KelbyLive session, I would heartily recommend it even given my limited sample. Do be aware of any challenges to get to the venue and be very planful in that regard. I suspect that they choose venues close to public transit but for out of towners, driving into a city core can be a major dampener on the day.
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