Yo all!<\/p>\n
Just a quick message here to let you know that I do have some fairly incredible photos of the Mars Volta (from the Mars Volta gig) to post when I get a chance. I also should have some more Neil young ones too\u2026 I just have to get around to tweaking them slightly (in the case of Neil Young) and uploading them (in the case of TMV). In the latter case I used my old Kodak P&S cam to get some pictures without looking like press\/carrying around a bulky camera, so as a result the pics probably did suffer loads.<\/p>\n
I did however did just suddenly realise how amazing RAW is for shooting images in potentially crap conditions. It\u2019s probably just as excellent in normal more optimal conditions, but I find it really does excel when the light\u2019s pretty low and faces are washed out with flashes and bright lights. It\u2019s probably prettty silly admitting this now – considering I\u2019ve had the camera for 2 and a bit years and it\u2019s never really occured to me to try RAW. The huge file size and slower relative speed probably hindered me trying it. But now that I\u2019ve got a 8gb fast card (from only the best CF Card manufacturer – Lexar) I pushed the boat out and gave it a go! It takes longer to write to the card (read: the red button lights up for longer) but it didn\u2019t seem to hinder my photo taking pace too much (large (enough) buffer size?), which really shows how excellently well made my EOS 350d is. You can read all about how amazing RAW is on various places on the internet, so I won\u2019t be going in to them now – I\u2019ll only mention that some photos that I would have normally discarded due to the overly white light flooding the faces of the subjects were \u2018repaired\u2019 to fix this issue almost entirely. Believe me, I was surprised when playing about with the RAW sliders in Aperture when the pic actually began to look good!<\/p>\n
This also brings me onto a few finer points about the Canon 350d that I have. While rather old (almost 3 years since released) in a quickly aging digital camera market, it performs excellently. It has had numerous revisions (350d -> 400d -> 450d) which has improved upon\/changed one aspect or another of its design\/features, but they haven\u2019t necessarily been that great. One issue that I maybe slightly have is that the LCD screen is too small at only 1.8?. While it is entirely practical still for reviewing photos – it would be nice if it was larger (only if it consumed the same or less battery life). There is the LCD status screen (backlit too) which is excellent for sorting out shutter speeds and settings etc. which has been removed from the revisions in place of a larger single LCD that displays the info (albeit not all the time and using more battery life?). I haven\u2019t used the current single lcd system, so I\u2019m really unsure as to it\u2019s advantages at the mo, then again I\u2019m happy with what I have. Another quibble is the APS-C sensor size (or whatever it\u2019s called) where there happens to be a 1.6x crop\/zoom on the FoV. This is sorted in larger more expensive lines – but currently it annoys me when using a 17mm fisheye!<\/p>\n
The new models also have a feature where the sensor can be cleaned\/dust shaken off? – whether this is completely necessary and useful I\u2019m not sure, but it sure sounds fancy! Then again if you do go for one of the newer revisions, then you\u2019d have more meagapixels thus a larger pixel density on the same size CMOS sensor, thus possibly increasing noise in the image (but also allowing larger images to be printed). I saw a rather good argument about it somewhere, but basically it stated that more pixels doesn\u2019t necessarily equal better quality! So in a sense, I think that 8 MP is probably good enough for the camera I have and the photos that I take.<\/p>\n
Another small thing to point out – I just noticed this and it well, made me happy, is that when the card is still writing to the camera and you switch the camera off (whether accidental or not) the images continue to be written to the card. This is probably (like RAW) a standard feature of DSLRs, but I just realised how great it is! Other small things continue to amaze me – and I\u2019ll try and point them out in due course! On a sad note unfortunately, I lost the rubber eyepiece hood thingummy while away in Europe and while it doesn\u2019t really make any difference to the functionality of the camera, it looks a bit silly and costs too much to warrant replacing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yo all! Just a quick message here to let you know that I do have some fairly incredible photos of the Mars Volta (from the Mars Volta gig) to post when I get a chance. I also should have some more Neil young ones too\u2026 I just have to get around to tweaking them slightly … <\/p>\n