More Tunnel Light

If this pic looks very similar to this one of my daughter, there's a reason.

Alex and his Mom described a picture they wanted me to make and showed me an example of one they had done previously; Alex looking down with the light coming in from the left, background out of focus. I tried photographing Julia in the tunnel to see how it would look before I suggested this to Alex.

I had Alex meet me at 7:00pm at Adriatica to do the shot. I noticed it was starting to get cloudy and could see a storm moving in in the distance. Alex arrived just as the rain started so I figured we might as well see what we can do anyway. The big problem was light. The dark clouds from the storm cut the light to almost 50% of what I was expecting to get.

This is where the 5D Mark II really came in handy. I borrowed a friends 50mm f1.4 and pushed the ISO up to 1600. This was the result. Not bad considering the light was very limited. In the raw image I could see just a little bit of grain when I zoomed in on the picture, but I was able to get rid of most of it using Lightroom, as well as converting the image to black & white.

Marvin @Koriente

This is my good friend Marvin whom I met up with while visiting Austin, TX. We were eating at a restaurant called Koriente and I took a few shots of him since the light looked pretty good where we were sitting.

This is a good example of how good the 5D Mark II is in low light. I didn't use a flash and was able to keep the ISO down at 100. If I had tried this with my old D80 the image would have been quite grainy. This one came out great. 70mm, 1/100 sec f4

Compressing the picture down to a jpeg to include it on this blog caused some loss of detail, but it looked fantastic on my monitor. The details I was able to capture in Marvin's face really surprised me. I LOVE my new camera..

Canon 5D Mark II (finally!)

About two weeks ago I collected all of my pennies, sold some prized possessions and donated a kidney, but finally managed to buy my Canon 5D Mark II. Since I've always been a Nikon user, I had to buy the lens, memory cards, UV filter etc. So this was not a small purchase. I bought the lens it came bundled with, which was a 24-105mm f4. Good enough for most situations and fine for doing portrait work. I haven't even bought a flash yet.

The main reason I bought this camera was it's ability to photograph in low light with little or no noise. My Nikon D80 couldn't be pushed much over an ISO of 400. My experiments with the 5D Mark II so far have been very good with an ISO up to 2000. I've tried some some shots over 3000 but the noise was fairly easy to see, but nothing like the D80. So far I'm pleased with the results.

At 21 MP it's almost a megapixel overkill. 15 MP would have been plenty and the 5D Mark II allows you to dial it down to 9.9 MP or 5.2 MP while still shooting in RAW. I haven't experimented with comparing the image quality to the 21 MP yet.

This camera is also one of the first to have the ability to shoot HD video. However, this is NOT a reason to buy the camera. It's a nice feature and the videos are beautiful, but it's not so easy to use. There's no autofocus for one thing, and the internal microphone pics up a lot of noise coming from inside the camera. I'll definitely need an external mic if I'm going to use it. It DOES give you the ability to shoot with a blurred background as long as your subject isn't moving around to much. That's something your average camcorder can't do.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the camera although I've barely scratched the surface of all this camera can do. Next purchase will definitely be a flash, probably the 580 EX II, and eventually my dream lens, the 50mm f1.2.

No Flash in the Author's Chair

I LOVE it when I don't have to use a flash!

Flash's are usually too harsh and very hard to control. In low light situations you'd be better off shooting with a wide aperture if you can. When outdoors I sometimes use a very subtle fill flash just to fill in some shadows or to make a key light visible in the subjects eye, but in a situation where I have little control (like in my daughters school) I hate using it.

Of course, using a higher ISO setting will increase the cameras sensitivity to light which also helps in low light situations. But with a Nikon D80, you can't really go higher than ISO 400 without getting a grainy image. I don't care what the manual or the "experts" say, that's the limit of the D80. I usually try to stay at either 100 (the lowest setting) or 200.

Anywho, yesterday my daughter's 4th grade class was doing something called "Author's Chair" where each student sits in a rocking chair in the school library and reads a story they wrote to parents, staff and other students. I noticed that the florescent lights were pretty bright in the library so I figured I'd try my 50mm f1.8 without the flash and see how it looked. I had the ISO set at 200.

Since my 50mm lens is a prime lens and not a zoom, I was constantly moving around trying to get a better shot. Some of the kids were distracted and my wife had warned me to try to stay in one seat, so I alternated between two different positions and then cropped the pictures after I got them home. I thought the results were not too bad for going flash-less.



The new Canon 5D Mark II reportedly can get up to ISO 6400 without being noisy. The camera is $2700 just for the body. I don't have any Canon lenses so I'd have to invest in that too. Altogether I'd be looking at.......well, I'd probably have to sell my car. For now, I'm saving my pennies and cutting my Starbucks visits.