A 2 gB CF card joins the Canon 5D.

When I first got my Canon EOS 5D I opted for two of SanDisk’s fastest 1 gB cards, the so called Extreme III, costing $103 each in February, 2006.

As digital tends to result in more pictures being taken, and as I shoot only in RAW on the 5D, given the ease of processing RAW images in Apple’s Aperture, I found myself running out of space on these cards more frequently than I like. Each holds 58 RAW images.

CF card prices continue to come down apace in price so I have added one 2 gB Extreme IV card, $91.95 after rebate to my CF card collection. Twice as much storage for less than a 1 gB card just 9 months earlier!

SanDisk claims the Extreme III can write data at no less than 20mB per second; by comparison, the Extreme IV is rated at ‘up to 40 mB per second’. Now ‘up to’ probably is some sort of ideal scenario and I have no idea if the card is faster as, with the 5D’s huge internal buffer I don’t need to care, but there’s no denying the capacity increase.

With an empty 1 gB card

With an empty 2 gB card

Now 120 photographs in one session is a lot for this photographer, but not having to change cards in ‘mid roll’ is one less thing to worry about. Further, these cards are so reliable in use that I am far less concerned about data loss than when I first got the 5D – the argument being that it’s better to store images over several cards to reduce loss if a card goes bad.

The largest card on the SanDisk web site is a 16 mB Extreme III which would store no fewer than 960 (!) RAW images, albeit at a punitive cost in excess of $1,000. Which, I suppose, means it will be $200 in twelve months’ time. Maybe I will be writing this piece again in a year, extolling the virtues of a thousand image card….

Read this if you cannot insert your Canon lens in the camera.

Coming back from a little nature expedition today, I found I still had the 200mm L on the Canon 5D, so I went to replace it with the 24-105mm L which usually makes its home on the body.

The only snag is that it refused to even fit into the breech of the bayonet on the body. I checked for damage on the lens’s bayonet and there was none. Hardly surprising as I had not dropped the lens.

I checked against my other two lenses – the 200mm L and the non-L 15mm fisheye. All three have a small Phillips head screw some 20 degrees counter-clockwise from the red mounting alignment dot, viewed with the bottom of the lens uppermost. No other protrusions exist around the circumference. So, it must be the screw.

I located my smallest Philips head jeweler’s screwdriver and, sure enough, the screw was loose. A moment’s work and all was well.

So if you run into this snag, don’t panic. And carry a Phillips screwdriver with you. A tad frustrating on a $1300 lens.

Not an unknown issue.

Mention of the dust removal system in the new Canon 400D prompts this column.

I pointed out how easily the guileless are fooled by horribly overpriced sensor cleaning solutions here.

I have since added another very effective tool to my sensor cleaning arsenal, on top of that little $5 brush. It is made by Hakuba, the ‘Lens Pen Pro’, and sells for all of $10, coming with both a retractable brush and less pliable spongy end when the going gets tough. It has far better reach than the film brush. In fairness, I have had few sensor dust problems with the 5D, but then again I live in a part of the USA where prevailing humidity levels are average; I cannot help wondering whether those in dry, static bearing, climates are more affected?

Well, the other day some of my pictures were plagued by a couple of spots on the sensor, requiring retouching in Aperture. Now I really don’t want to do this for a living, so I attacked the sensor – or more correctly the protective cover glass – with the brush end of the Lens Pal Pro, but to no avail. Whatever was there was well and truly stuck:

Dust spots on the sensor – greatly enlarged

So, screwing up my courage – the alternative is sending the camera to Canon at great expense and interminable delay – I had at it carefully with the ‘hard’ spongy end of the Hakuba, with the following result – the spot is almost gone and certainly good enough for me – the image would be 30″ x 40″ if printed:

Dust spots after using the ‘hard’ end of the Hakuba

I prefer this approach to using lens cleaning solution as my experience shows that even with Kodak Lens Cleaner, it’s quite hard to get drying stains off the cleaned surface, and the sensor is not that easily reached.

My first Hakuba Lens Pal Pro no longer wants to click the brush into the open position, so while it remains usable, I have another on order. At $10 it’s hard to complain.

Version 1.1.0 is now available.

You can download it from Canon here.

This fixes the following:

1. Enhancement of direct printing with specific printers.
2. Correction of the communication errors that occurred when shooting with EOS 5D and EOS Capture software after shooting about 138 shots.
3. Correction of the phenomenon (their word; what they mean is ‘error’) in which the flash mode settings are changed from E-TTL to M (Manual) when EOS 5D is used in combination with Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2 and Speedlite 580EX.

Of these #2 is probably of most interest. I wrote about Canon’s Capture software here. I haven’t actually taken 139 shots in a row using Capture – indeed, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon – but it always pays to keep current on these things.

I have installed the upgrade on my 5D and it seems fine.

A real live ‘shoot’

Marty Paris is not only a friend, he is also a fine acoustic guitarist. So when Marty asked me to take pictures at his open air concert this weekend I was glad to oblige, though somewhat apprehensive about the high contrast lighting issues this opportunity would present.

I would like to tell you that I took ‘just the EOS 5D and a couple of lenses’ for the ‘shoot’ (ugh!) but then I only have a couple of lenses, so that’s what I took!

The group, comprised of two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer, would be playing at the town square in Templeton, near my home, in the shade of the bandstand. A charming throwback to all that was good and great in Norman Rockwell’s America. People gambolling about with children and dogs. A hot dog stand. Sunshine and oak trees. Church steeples at every corner with the fire engine poised in case of emergency.

All well and good, but the bright sunlight meant blown out backgrounds from the huge contrast between lighting on the performers and the park setting. So I decided to make virtue out of necessity and used the Canon 200mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens (what a piece of glass!) mostly at f/2.8 to blur the background and give the pictures that studio look. Hardly the controlled environment of a studio, but the best I could do. The 5D was set at 400 ISO which resulted in short shutter speeds, mitigating the absence of the wonderful IS feature in the 200mm lens. Canon, are you listening? And prior experience with the 5D had confirmed that ISO 400 is grain free at any realistic enlargement size. Try that with color film!

I used that inspired little belt-mounted back up gadget, the exotically named Hyperdrive, to dowload full CF cards from the camera, alternating the one in the Hyperdrive with the one in the 5D. I ended up taking some 350 RAW pictures or some 6 cards’ full, and if you think that’s a lot, words fail me when trying to explain how many reasons there are for a bad picture in this environment. Clutter everywhere, closed eyes when they should be open, background noise, and on and on.

It took some 25 minutes to load Aperture from the Hyperdrive when getting home and, owing to Aperture’s superb user interface, only another three hours to cull the pictures down to the 85 best. That includes deletion of bad pictures, exposure correction and the occasional crop or straightening of the horizon. The only snags I ran into were that Aperture locked up on me twice when downloading from the Hyperdrive (no images were lost) and would take up to 20 seconds to load an image for processing. My iMac G5 has the modest Nvidia Radeon 6600 graphics card which is the major cause of the slow loading of an image on the screen. Then again, the iMac costs $1,500 rather than the $5,000 it would take to get a full blown Mac with a posh video card and Cinema Display. I can wait a few seconds for a picture to load at that price difference.

85 is a lot of photographs to end up with but the goal was to give each performer twenty or so pictures to choose from. You can see the snaps here.

Some practical notes from this little assignment. I set the focus sensor in the 5D to the center rectangle. I was not about to trust the camera’s system to guess optimum focus at f/2.8 with the 200mm lens when depth of field can be as little as an inch or so. I would generally take an exposure reading (using center weighting) from the concrete floor of the bandstand and lock it before composing, then locking focus with a first pressure of the shutter release on the performer’s eyes prior to final composition. This is all very fast once you get the hang of it. Despite all this I got the exposure wrong in several pictures, but RAW is so forgiving that correction in Aperture was easy without any noticeable quality loss. In particular I find the Highlights & Shadows slider in Aperture far superior to that in Photoshop as it produces far more realistic results and introduces far less noise into the image.

The slide show was generated using Aperture’s web creation function and this took far too long compared to using iPhoto. Some three hours. Apple really needs to speed this up.

The next morning I made four 13″ x 19″ prints on the HP DesignJet 90 plus five CDs with the slide show, and they were at Marty’s door by noon. I was trying to emulate what, say, a wedding pro might be faced with in delivering timely results to his client. The workflow above was encouraging in two respects. The percentage of overall time spent on processing compared to photography was relatively low and the processing experience was markedly stress free. So the 5D + RAW + Aperture + HP DesignJet proved to be a powerful and effective set of tools.

Was my ‘client’ pleased? Well, there were a lot of gurgling noises on the phone when he called back, so you be the judge. Now maybe I can get him into my studio.