Mokka mit Schlag » Photography

There were more announcements from Canon today of more new equipment than I ever remember seeing from them before. If Canon was making computers, there’d be enough meat here for a MacWorld keynote. I hope they keep up this pace in the future. Previously, they’ve been rather lackadaisical about releasing new professional grade equipment. Some of their lens models are almost 20 years old at this point. Let’s hope this is a precursor of more cool things to come. And now on to the specifics.

Canon 60D

The 60D was decidedly underwhelming. In some ways, it’s a downgrade from the 50D, especially if you don’t want to shoot video. It is slightly lighter, which is nice, and the controls it removed are controls I’ve never used anyway. Perhaps I’d find a use for the articulating screen. However I was really hoping for something that would be an improvement on the 7D, not merely a slight upgrade over a Rebel. Features I was looking for included better high ISO performance, waterproof, 45 point autofocus, better autofocus, ring of fire, and the ability to autofocus at f/8. Just maybe this camera has less noise at medium and high ISO than the 50D does. Once again, we’ll have to wait for reviews to find out. However it failed to meet all the other desiderata. At $1099 (body only) it is reasonably priced, but unless you want to shoot video you might well prefer the slightly cheaper 50D.
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Suppose I edit a raw file in Photoshop with levels as follows:

What are the Lightroom equivalents of these values? Is there a mathematical formula that converts from Photoshop’s black, white, and midpoint slider values to Lightroom’s Exposure, Blacks, Recovery, Fill Light, Brightness, and Contrast sliders?

I shoot raw, and develop in Lightroom. (Version 2; just haven’t upgraded quite yet but I suspect the questions are the same for the recently released version 3.) Sometimes the results are pretty good out of the box, but usually they require a lot of manual tweaking to make the light work. I suspect they may be designed more for wedding and portrait and landscape photography and the like and less for the wildlife and macro photography I like to do. There are two areas I have questions about, the initial settings and the auto adjustments.

Here’s a harvestman with Lightroom’s default settings:

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My friend Steve Nanz is of the opinion that in 2010 I shouldn’t even consider a lens that doesn’t have image stabilization. He suggested that I might want to try Canon’s 100-400 mm f/5.6L zoom lens instead of the 400mm f/5.6L prime that I have been using. I actually did test the 100-400 mm f/5.6 L lens rather thoroughly while I was shopping for lenses last year and earlier this year. It’s a good lens to be sure, but I just found that I got better results of the prime lens. Still Steve is a better photographer than I am so I thought I’d give it one more try. Here’s what I found:

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After months of consulting multiple manuals, books, forums, and experts, I finally figured out why my Canon 50D + 580EXII flash wouldn’t work in high speed sync mode. That is, when I turned on the flash the maximum shutter speed was 1/250s. No matter what I set the ISO, shutter speed, mode, or aperture to, I could never get shutter speed faster than 1/250s. No matter what mode and settings I applied to the flash and/or camera, as soon as the flash was ready, shutter speed dropped to 1/250s. (I could easily take pictures without flash at speeds faster than 1/250s as lighting conditions and settings permitted.)

If you’re encountering this problem on a 50D (and likely other Canon models) here’s what you (probably) need to do:
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Got a Canon 400mm f/5.6L from UPS today. I still have to take it out in the field, but despite the lack of image stabilization it’s possibly the sharpest lens I’ve tried:

This is handheld with flash but no tripod and wide open!
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