Canon 5D sensor dust revisited

Canon 5D

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.

QTVR on the big screen

QTVR

100″ of forest glory!

I wrote the other day about displaying QTVR pictures on the TV screen.

Today, using the same connecting cables with my iBook I plugged the computer into the ‘Video 1’ input on the AV unit in our home theater and what do you think I got?

Surround sound quality from the MP3 soundtrack – which you can listen to here – was excellent, even if only in two channel stereo. Visual quality was marginal, probably accounted for by the fact that I used a fairly modest quality setting on the Canon 5D when snapping the images. Further, I constrained the quality of the Quicktime movie to keep file size small for speedy loading from my web site. On the other hand, we are talking a 100″ diagonal screen here – now that’s an enlargement!

The screen is 16:9 format (1.78:1) which suits most movies. The QTVR is 2.55:1 which is standard widescreen, and the difference in aspect ratios accounts for the black bars at the top and base of the screen area. I could save the QTVR image in CubicConverter to match this format if desired, thus filling the screen.

For my upcoming one man show at a local winery in April 2007, I hope to get in a couple of big screen TVs as an advertising promotion with a local TV vendor and will thus have QTVRs running throughout the show in addition to the display of framed, static photographs.

Costly excess

Photography

Canon introduces the 50mm f/1.2 L.

A while back Canon used to sell a 50mm f/1.0 L lens for its DSLRs, quietly discontinuing it rather than face the barrage of derision it generated. Seems that the bottom of an old Coke bottle had superior resolving power and you could buy half of Atlanta’s annual production for less.

Now, just in time for Photokina, Canon announces the slightly slower 50mm f/1.2 L variant.

I confess that it has always left me wondering why anyone makes an f/1.2 standard lens. The quality has historically been poorer than the f/1.4 across the board, the weight and bulk double and the cost far greater. All of this for half a stop in speed?

Step back a moment and think about this. In its DSLR range Canon has the best sensors on the market. Sony may be catching up (they make the sensors for the Nikon DSLRs) but try your full frame Canon DSLR at 1600 ISO and you will know what I am talking about. Now given that you can make more than acceptable originals for 10x enlargements at 1600 ISO, how on earth can half a stop be justified? Shoot in RAW and you can pick up another stop or two at the processing stage with very little quality loss.

So unless you really need to have bragging rights, keep your money and buy a couple of f/1.4 variants. The f/1.2 will retail at $1,600 (!), whereas the f/1.4, a lens with a great reputation, sells for $315. You can drop one of the f/1.4s on the concrete sidewalk and still walk away unhurt…. Now I know that $1,600 is chump change by Leica’s standards whose superb 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux sells for no less than $3,900, but then only collectors and tort lawyers (prrobably the same thing) buy those anyway.

I would far prefer to see Canon adding internal IS to their top of the line bodies (like Sony/Minolta) or at least incorporate IS in the 400mm f/5.6 L lens, which sorely needs it.

A Blast from the Past

Photographers

Extraordinary recreations by a Russian photographer.

Run, don’t walk, to see the work of Dmitry Popov, a Russian photographer who has meticulously recreated scenes from the first 60 years of the American Century for a car magazine. Each features period automobiles together with actors in period clothing recreating the time and feel of a place (mostly) in America, none better than this one at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The man reading the San Francsco Examiner, leaning on his magnificent Buick, is doing so on September 3, 1939 – the war that America won for an ungrateful Europe would not start here until some 27 month later, when Japanese tourists visited Hawaii.

Popov writes:

“Every photo shoot is preceded by thorough research of the era. When and under what conditions a particular vehicle model was produced sets the theme. The majority of my photographs are the result of a classically arranged photo shoot. The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era. Although each of the photographic series on each site is presented only partially, the collection taken in its entirety tells a story. The term “Photo-Clipping” would best describe my collection. The series of pictures tells a “moving” story using still images. Most of photographs on this site were taken between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine Autopilot produced by the Kommersant Publishing and Golf Style Next magazine, Moscow, Russia.”

This is story telling in the classsic mould of Life or Picture Post magazines of the era, when photojournalism was king and television in every home was still a distant idea in RCA’s corporate brain.

You don’t have to like cars to enjoy Popov’s fabulous work, though it doesn’t hurt if you do.

Highly recommended.

QTVR on the TV screen

QTVR

A couple of cables, a smart friend and the iBook do the trick.

My eventual goal for the QTVRs + sound that I am making is to show them on the big screen, meaning the 100″ screen in the home theater on which I project movies.

Well, my iBook, a nice portable source for all of this, is a rather dated G4 model so the first port of call was my trusty nerdy friend, a man of great erudition and wisdom when it comes to things computer. As usual, he did not disappoint.

As advised, I bought an adapter from Apple for some $25 for the video signal – its output end looks like this:

Apple calls it the ‘iBook Video Adapter’ and it connects to the mini-VGA socket on the side of the keyboard. If you want to do this make sure you get the right adapter for your iBook – they vary from model to model.

Those outputs are, respectively, S video and Composite video. As I have a few composite video cables lying around terminated with standard RCA phono plugs, I connected the adapter to the iBook and thence to one of the yellow video inputs on the front of my TV and, hey presto!, the image appeared on the screen, easily controllable with the track pad on the iBook.

For sound, my nerdy friend advised that the only way to do things with this older iBook (meaning it’s completely obsolete, being 3 years old….) was to rout a stereo minijack cable from the low level headphone output using an RCA phono plug-terminated cable to attach the sound feed to the ‘Tape’ input on my receiver. The latter is an ancient Onkyo bought used for very little and produces great sound. Sure enough, the oracle did not let me down, as sounds of birds twittering proceeded to emanate from the speakers. Once inserted the poor quality internal speakers in the iBook were silenced.

It may not look pretty but it works:

I also tried connecting the red and white phono plugs from the iBook to the sound terminals on the TV and there was more than enough signal to drive the TV’s speakers at adequate volume, even if the fidelity was lower than through the speakers attached to the stereo system.

The next step, then, is to try this same setup with the home theater system. This panorama used HDR photography to prevent the bright outdoors from burning out.