Current Photo Equipment/Review

I currently have no dedicated "pro" level equipment (i.e. Canon L lenses) to speak of, except perhaps film...and my Canon FS4000 film scanner.  I take all of my pictures on consumer-level equipment; my philosophy is to try to attempt to surpass currently equipment before moving on to better or more stuff.  The camera and lens itself is only as good as the operator, and most modern equipment outperforms most modern users.

For most of my (seven or so) years of photography I've worked with the Canon Rebel series, but recently I've moved up to the Elan 7E.  The Elan is a advanced amateur or "semipro" camera which has a series of features which supposedly make photography easier, while the Rebel 2000 is a amateur camera which is smaller, lighter, less expensive, and easier to use than the Elan.  For me, the upgrade rationale is given by the following small but noticable advantages of the Elan over the Rebel 2000, in order of current importance to me:

a)  Leader-out rewind, allowing rolls of film to be easily switched midroll
b)  7-point eye-controlled focus (ECF)
c)  Slightly brighter viewfinder with slightly better eye relief for eyeglass users
d)  Quieter operation
e)  Faster autofocus
f)  Mirror lock up (MLU), which allows sharper pictures to be taken at certain speeds by eliminating mirror slap vibration
g)  Heavier body balances slightly better when using the heavy 28-135IS Canon lens, preventing lens creep

For travel, I can keep higher-speed negative film in the Rebel and slower-speed slide film in the Elan 7E, although the Elan 7E's midroll rewind is so convenient I'm starting to think I will only need one camera body from now on.

Regardless of the wonderful upgrade to Elan 7E, there are still incredibly important features lacking and only unfortunately available in a pro camera, e.g. EOS 3.   These things are:

a)  closer to 100% viewfinder coverage, the R2K and Elan have about 90-92%.
b)  a smaller spot metering percentage, I think the R2K is about 10%
c)  brighter viewfinder

I used to use a Rebel G, which is inferior to the Rebel 2000 in almost every way, but it has been broken and I don't want to repair it again (12/2002).

Even given that fate shows me buying a digital camera in several years, I still wouldn't mind having a Hasselblad Xpan, a panoramic format 35mm camera that takes double-width (~68mm?) film shots.  But like all Hassies it's an order of magnitude higher ($2000) in price than my current cameras...so it'll have to wait for another day.

I think the 28-135 is one of the best consumer level medium zooms on the market today in terms of photographic quality.  It is potentially very sharp.  It has a generous range which goes from moderately wide to about long portrait length (85-135mm range, or a very short telephoto).  It has image stabilization.  Unfortunately, it's also fairly heavy, and the aperture is not so fast.  The range from 105-135mm is not particularly sharp wide open and has some light falloff in the corners wide open.  Also, the lens is very physically big and can obstruct the built-in flash (an unpleasant surprise).  Finally, I have noticed an alarming amount of lateral (non-axial) play in the zoom mechanism, and I've already broken a plastic retaining ring in the lens by normal use.  This is exaggerated by the fact that when the lens points downward (and it does because it weighs more than the R2K!) and the loose zoom mechanism zooms out by itself.  This lens is heavy.

The 28mm side can take exactly one normal-sized filter before vignetting.  You have to remove the UV filter if you want to put on a polarizer.  I have recently noticed that my 28-135 has noticably heavy barrel distortion on the wide (28mm) end.  You're not going to be taking much architecture with this lens, it's pretty bad when straight lines are near the lens edges; eg pillars or doorways.  I have also noticed that wide open at f/3.5  even on the wide end the corner quality degrades quite dramatically, which is apparent when you blow up the film.  You need to shoot between f/8 and f/11 for maximum sharpness, lower runs into lens limitations and bigger runs into the diffraction limit..

It's still a wonderful lens, and you will probably not do better with any other one-lens zoom solution.  It's extremely sharp under most conditions.  It focuses very fast.

Recently (9/02) I've noticed that the 28-135 lens has been putting down images with unsharp upper left corners, even at f/8 and above.  This is vaguely unsettling and maybe the lens needs to be aligned.  This does not make me a happy camper.

The 75-300 is relatively slow and heavy.  It needs to be stopped down on a tripod or in excellent light to get reasonably sharp pictures with ISO 100 film, especially in the 200-300mm range.  The image stabilization is good but not magic; 1/30 second at 300mm is definitely recognizable but not very sharp unless you are good or lucky.  I still have not gotten a single great macro shot.  One pleasant finding is that the lens works at f/4 at 75mm, and it's not bad in that range.  So it's slightly faster than the 28-135 in the equivalent short portrait range, making it noticably easier to focus in low light.  And soft may also be a virtue in portraits.  For the money, the 70-200 f/4 is probably a better choice most of the time unless you really need the slightly soft 200-300mm; however, *I* feel I need it.  You can't get any closer to the top of a building, and sometimes you need to be far away to get a proper perspective.

The next step up from the 75-300 is the stellar 70-200 f/4.0 L zoom.  Canon's zoom is one of the cheapest L zooms, but is one of the sharpest lenses available in its range.  With a 1.4X teleconverter it should still handily beat the 75-300 IS quality at 280mm, though of course I not have IS.  If I were to buy this, it would be my first purchase of professional equipment.  Of course, there is always the 70-200 f/2.8 L...

The 50mm f/1.8 is a very nice lens.  For ~$70 you can get a lens which has has been around so long that the optics have reached pretty much the optimal design for the price point it is at.  It is sharp and contrasty, and focuses relatively quick for being non-USM.  The 50mm prime is also extremely light; combined with the R2K body the combo is light enough and small enough to be more or less the same weight as either of my bigger lenses.  Unfortunately, it appears as if it will take practice to focus it correctly, since depth of field is very small at f/1.8 and wearing glasses impedes focusing quite a bit on Canon bodies.  In order to focus properly I have to set center spot autofocus, and even then I can't focus on more than one person at a time at f/1.8.  This is likely to become much easier now that I have an ECF body.

The 50mm Mark II is pretty much an all-plastic lens, with no metal even on the inside.  This makes it, in my opinion, very fragile.  I dropped one in Japan, and it fell about 1.5 feet to rocks in Nikko.  Even without a filter, the glass is recessed and was absolutely untouched, but the central plastic strut that surrounds the glass and holds the lens together shattered with the sound of a lightbulb breaking, and thus the lens came apart.  I snapped it back together but it could not focus properly.  It is now serving as a loupe.

I have just (3/2003) bought a 24mm wide-angle prime for my upcoming trip to Utah.  The EF 24mm Canon is a wonderful lens.  It is much smaller and lighter than I had imagined, and certainly the build quality is better than the 50 f/1.8 Mark II.  I bought it because the 28-135 is weak especially in the corners at 28mm, with fair amount of distortion and lower sharpness than a prime, even stopped down to f/11.  In contrast, the 24mm prime is said to be sharp, relatively distortion-free, and is significantly wider than the zoom's wide end.  The focus noise is louder and higher than the 50mm EF, but I hope this will not be a problem.

The 24mm prime served me well, even after I dropped it onto hard dirt from a height of about three feet.  Obviously this is made of sterner stuff than the 50 f/1.8, of which I've destroyed ANOTHER one during my Utahn journey.  I won't be buying another Mark II, it's either going to be Mark I or 50 f/1.4.  I've had enough of plastic.

I use slide film for almost everything, and scan it on my film scanner.  Provia 100F is excellent film.  I began using it early in my photographic ventures and I haven't run into big problems with it.  It is a medium-high saturation, extremely fine grained film.  I've never had a problem with film grain with it compared to scanner noise.  Provia tends to be a bit slow (I rate it at 80) and tends toward blue in some scenes.  Others have reported that it is "cold" or renders blue oddly and I sometimes notice this but I can't find repeatable data for it.  I have tried Velvia and Astia also.  Astia is also fine film and has better color accuracy (slightly warmer though) than Provia, but somewhat less saturation, but better shadows.  Astia also appears somewhat more grainy than Provia, but this is not noticable unless you need a huge enlargement.  Velvia is wonderful, extremely high-saturation film, a favorite of famed nature photography John Shaw.  Unfortunately, I believe that the way Velvia renders bright reds and (some) greens is extremely nasty, sort of like getting socked in the retina by your subject.  This is apparent even when the film is exposed well, such in Shaw's excellent shots.  Velvia also tends to make shadows really dark because it has plenty of contrast; together with its ISO 50 speed it makes the film very hard to use properly.

NPH I'm still trying to get used to.  I use NPH on people.  I hear you can get good prints from a Fuji Frontier from NPH but I'm scanning here.  NPH is a decent scanning film and you can get nice, not-over-the-top color and good (somewhat pale though) skin tones, but results vary greatly.  I've noticed that reds can be very good, strong without blocking up, but greens have been coming out weirdly pastel.  I rate NPH at 320 in order to increase color saturation and contrast a bit, and probably could go to 200.  I'm currently experimenting with using NPH and flash together, which seems like a good combo.

NHGII is a high-speed film, ISO 800, but I rate it at 640.  Combining NHGII with image stabilization is a very powerful combo.  I was able to get good shots indoors at about 1/15 and 28mm in St. Paul's where it's pretty dark.  Fast lenses will not help you if you want depth of field.  Tripods I believe are not allowed.  Here IS wins hands down, you can easily handhold the above numbers with IS.  Unfortunately, many NHGII shots scan horribly due to grain aliasing problems, especially at lower light situations.  NHGII's saturation is fine and contrast is higher than NPH but in my few rolls of NHGII I have found the film's color to be very warm (or scan warm, whichever).

Recently, Fuji has brought out a new film, NPZ, which is said to be the successor to NHGII.  I've tried it briefly for a shooting job for the North American Membrane Society conference.  NPZ is generally very good, like NHGII, but it is probably best for (bounce) flash photography or windowed areas.  When it doesn't have enough light, it gets extremely grainy, even rated at EI640.  Unfortunately, this means that all of the darker areas of even a normal photo have grain aliasing problems on my scanner, and I can see the individual grains even on the lightbox.   I think part of the problem is NPZ's increased contrast over NHGII, which gives you more dark areas than the lower contrast NHGII.  Regardless, flash pictures turn out well, and NPZ can be color corrected well even with somewhat mixed lighting.  

I've now tried and evaluated Kodak Supra 800 (1/2003), at the LA Auto Show.  Indoors, Kodak Supra rocks quite well with the best of them.  It truly works well at EI800, unlike NPZ and NHGII, which require EI640 or smaller to avoid excessive grain.  It is clear that it has more contrast and thus even the scanned pictures are slightly more harsh than the Fuji films, but the grain in the shadow areas is not overpowering like in those two films.  It handles strange lighting quite well and the grain seems better than NHGII.  I like the results so far and I'm looking forward to trying more of it later.  I have not tried it outdoors but it looks like a winner for indoor shots under various ambient lighting.

Recently (3/02) I tried Kodak's highly recommended T400CN, an ISO 400 C-41 type black and white film, to try to take indoors band shots for Tigerella.  I rated it at 1600 and pushed two stops; but even then I wasn't able to bring the shutter speed up to a usable range with my consumer zooms, so I was forced to use flash almost exclusively.  However, the high speed allowed me to bounce all the flash and thus usable pictures resulted in most cases.  Even pushed two stops the T400 was amazing, and black and white goes much better with flash than color film.  The film also scans very well with my Vuescan/Minolta combo.  (11/02) Rated at ISO 400, the film is excellent, but actually there isn't a huge difference between 400 and push-2 for this film, at least psychovisually.  Grain just doesn't look terribly bad in black and white even if it's fairly huge.

(09/25/02)  I've now used some Fuji Reala 100 speed film.  Fuji Reala is overall, very nice film, moderate contrast and controlled grain.  After comparing it directly to Provia 100, I noticed the following:  1)  Reala is much warmer than Provia, 2) Reala is just as sharp but much more grainy than Provia (you can see this in smooth areas like sky or out-of-focus backgrounds), and 3) Reala knocks the socks off of Provia in mid-day light.  I haven't used negative film for so long outdoors that I forgot that it's possible to take a picture of somebody at noon without getting huge black spots.  I think I will be loading an alternate body full of Reala for use in the middle of the day, i.e. when out hiking and camping.  I do believe that Reala is much better with green than NPH, which makes nice pastel cake-frosting colored grass. 

(09/14/03)  Fuji has lately come out with Velvia 100F and Astia 100F.  Velvia is once again probably wonderful, but it likely retains all of the characteristics I don't like about Velvia Classic; the foremost being ugly rendering of reds.  Astia, however, is much more interesting.  Astia 100F has finer grain than Provia and less contrast, while retaining a good amount of saturation.  The main problem with Astia I had was that it was grainier than Provia; it was warmer and generally well-behaved.  I think I will be trying some of this film in the near-future.

Canon's 380EX flash has decent power and was made to be optimally compatible with the ElanII, not the Rebel, so I have no second-curtain flash capability (*shrug*) or fill compensation (!).  It has tilt functions but not swivel.  The performance of the 380EX on the Rebel is marred by the lack of any on-flash fill compensation controls.  You can use the ISO setting to get around this, but I haven't bothered to do this.  Too bad I didn't wait around for the 420EX, sequel to the 380 which apparently has more power and on-flash controls.

At first I used a Stofen Omnibounce flash diffuser, but it really did absolutely nothing.  Recently I have almost nailed a good combination for flash pictures:  bounce flash off of a white ceiling, but with a cut piece of Epson heavyweight matte white photo paper rubber-banded to the back of the flash.  The paper is very white and a 4"x 4" section bounces some stray white light forward while the rest goes to the ceiling.  Suddenly flash pictures are dramatically better.  I only wish that the 380 had enough power to give me good E-TTL exposures with  ISO100 Provia at f/5.6, 1/30, which is approximately what I shoot around now.  Right now I can't bounce flash off the ceiling unless I'm very close.

Note to self:  Use flash with 800 speed negative film, it generally works a lot better than 100 speed slide film...unless you have a huge flash to bounce.  Which I do not.

I bought the Bogen relatively recently.  Until now, I've been using mainly the cannabalized King folding tripod.  Yes, it's spindly, blows around in a breeze, it's short, and my camera is far too heavy for it (it bows alarmingly using the 28-135, I can't use the 75-300 with it).  Most serious photographers would never use it.  But it's still infinitely better than having no tripod, and I can carry it with me in my pocket or lash it to a belt loop.  I will start using the Bogen more but there are times that I just can't bring it.  If you read Galen Rowell's "Mountain Light" it seems that every other picture he put his camera on a rock, or propped it up with leaves or whatever he happened to find around.  His pictures look fine, so this tells me that makeshift support is much better than no support.  So I imagine that a spindly tripod is going to be ok as long as I don't try to blow prints up to 20" x 24".

The Bogen tripod quick release is amazingly convenient, but it needs to be paired with a anti-twist quick release plate, otherwise the heavy 28-135IS or 75-300IS lenses annoyingly cause the body to sag when taking vertical shots.

(09/14/03) I have started a habit of taking the large tripod everywhere on a hike.  My opinion now being, you never know when you might need it.  And I do need it.

The Minolta is a great film scanner at a reasonable price, although it has some problems with noise in high-density (e.g. dark) slides.  I use Vuescan, as the Minolta software is pretty but inefficient.  Vuescan allows single-pass multiscan capabilities, which I use to reduce the dark noise.  The Minolta unfortunately has no automated film scanning capabilities, although the newer USB version can scan 4 slides or 6 negatives at once.  I'm stuck scanning one-by-one, which is extremely time-consuming.  I use Corel Photopaint 9.0 and manipulate 24-bit images, reducing them to high quality JPG files for storage.  For web use I usually oversample and reduce to 600 pixels wide with antialiasing, then clean it up with directional sharpening in the 30-60 percent range.  I don't use unsharp masking (a favorite with photoshop experts) unless I have large images.  I'm currently working on making my images look decent on the widely different monitor gammas that all of my friends no doubt have.

I've recently (9/03) bought a Canon FS4000 film scanner.  42-bit A/D + 4000 dpi is the upper limit of what I will ever need in a film scanner.  Why buy a film scanner when I intend to hit digital sometime?  Well, for serious work I'm still using slides because I can't afford a full-frame digital sensor.  And I have all of those old slides which are still looking pretty good; maybe they would benefit from a 4000 dpi rescan.  I have that luxury since I still have the old slides.  The Canon is noticably sharper than the Minolta, but I'm pretty much rendering film grain at this point.  Also, I'm starting to see all of the lens faults that were invisible with the Minolta.  Shucks, I'm going to have to upgrade again.  Overall, I have improved quality but not the stellar increase I expected.  I guess I got really good with the Minolta/Vuescan combo, and I'm not so good at the Vuescan/Canon combo.

I print on an old 6-color (CcYMmK) Epson Photo 750 which is starting to show its age.  The Epson 750's major weakness IMHO is its nasty, nasty rendering of darker reddish or maroon-type colors...such as shadowed flesh, sigh, so they're in every portrait.  It produces these ink clumps which look absolutely awful.   I've experimented with a lot of papers but Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper is the most near-photographic I've found so far.  It's almost time to get a new printer, but I will probably keep this around maybe for 4-shade grey true B/W printing.  I am continually adjusting the calibration but I've found that certain settings of ICM tend to work ok. 

I've used Epson Colorlife semi-gloss.  This paper is reasonably good, I like the rougher surface which looks more like traditional photos.  However, the tonal range of the paper is much smaller than PGPP, so you have to move the black point up in order to get a full range of luminances out of it.  Supposedly this paper is more archival than PGPP, which I hope is true.  Warning:  Colorlife coating is soluble in water, so if you get it just a little bit wet, you will destroy it completely.  I wouldn't use it anywhere where it might someday get damp.

I've recently returned to Heavyweight Matte, after some thought of how to calibrate it.  After examining a 10-bar greyscale, I decided that a juryrigged way to correct the print was to raise the gamma, raise the black point, add green to the shadows, and add slight blue to the highlights before printing.  Now the paper makes amazing prints, which I'm starting to like better than PGPP; it is still not as sharp and does not have the color separation of PGPP but tonal gradations are smoother and the paper can truly produce deep black.  Plus, it's cheaper and more archival than the PGPP, which quickly ends up fading red in my experience.  It's excellent for 4x6" prints, and behind glass I bet it would actually look better than PGPP.