Photography Thailand Forum

[bkkdave]

Marc the other two lenses are the Canon 16-35 L f/2.8 and 70-200 L f/2.8. The 70-200 is just too heavy for me now and I don't know whether I will get the 2.8  IS version or the f/4 IS; however I have not needed that focal length for some time now.

The 16-35 has not been used since I purchased the 5D in Oct 2007; that brought my 24-105 to a wide enough lens for what I shoot.
I too have noticed the vignetting with the 24-105.
Thanks

[bkkdave]

David thanks for the link to: https://www.keh.com/onlinestore/home.aspx  I will take a look.

[Marc Schultz]

Marc the other two lenses are the Canon 16-35 L f/2.8 and 70-200 L f/2.8. The 70-200 is just too heavy for me now and I don't know whether I will get the 2.8  IS version or the f/4 IS; however I have not needed that focal length for some time now.

The 16-35 has not been used since I purchased the 5D in Oct 2007; that brought my 24-105 to a wide enough lens for what I shoot.
I too have noticed the vignetting with the 24-105.
Thanks

Thanks Dave for the info on the other lenses. Is the 70-200 lens you have the IS version?

I also have the older 17-35mm and to be honest I don't use it very much. I don't like the barrel distortion at such wide angles unless I am using a fish eye lens where the affect can be nice. But that is just a personal preference 

[Marc Schultz]

Dave--you did pretty well selling it. You can compare to this site in USA. https://www.keh.com/onlinestore/home.aspx  BTW, over the years I have sold a lot of stuff thru them, they are very fair, and you usually would have a check in 2 or 3 days. Marc--I also listed assorted stuff on the site recently, and like Dave had no replies. Was a bit surprised, till I saw the other day I goofed with the conversion rate and stuff was higher prices than I was asking. I sold the 16-35mm, but except for the 15mm the other stuff is tentatively  "sold" to a friend--that is when he pays me for it all. :-)

Sorry to hear that Dave. I know that David Proctor for example had good results in selling stuff through this Forum in the past. Craigslist (www.criagslist.org) is also a good place to try and is free too. I even sold a condo in Bangkok through that site once!

[bkkdave]

Thanks Dave for the info on the other lenses. Is the 70-200 lens you have the IS version?

Marc the 70-200 f2.8L is not the IS version; if it were I would not consider selling it. I just can't hold it steady anymore. When I got the 24-105 f/4L IS to replace the 24-70 f/2.8L I was amazed at how much better my images were because of the IS

[Marc Schultz]

Marc the 70-200 f2.8L is not the IS version; if it were I would not consider selling it. I just can't hold it steady anymore. When I got the 24-105 f/4L IS to replace the 24-70 f/2.8L I was amazed at how much better my images were because of the IS

Thanks for the additional info. The IS only helps you at stabilizing and sharpening your images at slower shutter speeds. When shooting as faster shutter speeds the IS should not make any difference. If you are seeing a noticeable improvement at the faster shutter speeds in sharpness as well then it probably has something more to do with you becoming more accurate with focus points and holding the camera in the same position when focus locking and then recomposing a shot before releasing the shutter.

[bkkdave]

Marc thanks for your comments; I always study the EXIF medtdata in Lr2 along with my images to try to learn where I might improve something. When I shot film it seemed I did not have these focus / sharpness problems. I always used a tripod where possible and even without one, using a 300 f/2.8L non IS; either with a mono- pod or hand held I got excellent results; and that was from shooting High School Football games in Arizona which are always played at night under horrible lighting conditions. I did have to go through a learning curve to get good results but at one game a news photographer gave me some tips and a roll of his film to try and that really helped me along.  I have shot many bicycle races and equestrian events where timing was everything especially for the fussy horse folks. Had to have the exact 'spot' going over a jump or they would reject the image. I did well but that got boring in a hurry as I lost interest in that type of photography. Being a former Marine; picking off a horse going over a jump with a telephoto lens was a bit too easy.

I also shot a lot of Velvia for landscapes; again with excellent results.
After I switched to digital; sometimes I just scratch my head and wonder what the problem is. Of course with post processing things eventually look very good but with film and slides I never relied on that. I have noticed a significant improvement going from a 20D to a 5D. Thankfully I am not a professional so I do not rely on my images for a living; but it is my hobby and I do want to be the best that I can.

I appreciate your comments,

Thanks

[Marc Schultz]

Dave, sorry for the late reply on this and thanks for sharing. A couple of things come to mind. One is that all digital SLR cameras have something which is called a "low pass" filter which helps to reduce noise in digital images. It also softens the sharpness a lot which is what makes unsharpened digital images look softer than film. Once sharpened though, the sharpness should be the same if not better from digital. There is an article here on the Israeli Microsoft site which explains the low pass issue in more detail:

http://www.microsoft.com/israel/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/sharpening.mspx

Going from the 20D to the 5D you probably saw an increase in both sharpness and overall detail. You went from a crop factor sensor to a full frame sensor with bigger pixel receptor sites and a processor which controls noise much better. So that makes a difference too. What I realized too when I made the jump from a 10D to a 1DS Mark II 4 years ago was that when I started with more pixels, and then downsized the image to low-res, I had much more detail than with images shot with the lower pixel camera even at low-res sizes.

I used to think that if I only needed something in low-res that the original number of pixels didn't matter so much. I learned quickly though that it makes a big difference. Even if you took an image from a Mark II (16MP) and a Mark III (22MP) and reduced them both down to low-res, you should see a bit better detail in the image shot with the Mark III, although maybe negligible. But the difference will not be as pronounced as going from say a 10D to a Mark II or even a 20D to a 5D. I guess the simple answer is "you start with more detail and you end up with more detail, even at small file sizes".

Hope that helps...

[bkkdave]

Re: Digital Sharpening    http://www.microsoft.com/israel/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/sharpening.mspx

Marc thanks for the your explanation and the link to the article. This does explain part of the problem I was experiencing with 'soft' images. I have been reading quite a bit and some authors seem to recommend the 'Smart Sharpen' filter instead of 'Unsharp mask' and then using a layer mask to selectively sharpen only those areas that you want. One video I like is 'Photoshop CS3 Portrait Retouching Essential' with Chris Orwig from Lynda training videos. He really does a lot and I have learned only some of it because I have to re-watch it and take notes.
He uses the 'High Pass' filter with adjustment layers to sharpen the selected areas like the eyes, eye lashes. and eye brows. The one problem I see with using sharpening with adjustment layers is it is a 'one-by-one image at a time' process and very time consuming for me;  and I cannot use it for 'batch processing' a large volume of images.

I have purchased most of the Topaz Labs software ever since you first mentioned it on the forum a while back. So what I did was experiment a bit with 'actions' as a All-in-One batch process for finalizing the RAW images after basic clean up of the blemishes. wrinkles, etc. What that does is run the image through a Denoise filter>Sharpen filter>then one of the Topaz Adjust filters>Adjust Contrast>10% Mid tone Adjustment; as you suggested prior to printing. It is far from perfect but it sure looks better than the RAW image I started with. Each image adjustment using the Batch Process takes about 5 minutes. Right now I am running a Batch on 160 images and it has been running for about 6 hours now and is about two-thirds finished. I also use Lr2 and there are a lot of filters available from Matt Kloskowski from Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips and also from 'WOW' from On-One. Sharpening in Lr2 is easy especially with the 'Adjustment Brush' but getting the noise under control is something I have not discovered as yet; therefore it is back to CS3.

I have also been very interested in the 'digital work flow' and am beginning to get a handle on it although it still needs improvement. And what I am doing seems a bit clumsy to me.

 I started to shoot 'RAW' last year and so far I am still wondering if that is the best way because it introduces more post processing for me. That said; everything I have read recommends shooting 'RAW'.

Thanks

[jessiet12]

Looks great! A lot of great thoughts!

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photography blog

[theoutdoorzone]

Cameras are much cheaper in Malaysia. If you need to know where to get them, I can pass out some shops contacts. Thanks

[aperture1.4]

Hi The outdoorzone
                             Please let me know address and websites of shops selling cameras at cheaper rates than Thailand .

Thanks
aperture 1.4

[bkkdave]

Marc,

Thank you for the Craigslist information; I did sell the 5D to a very nice person who happened to see the ad. I had it in the box; ready to take to the US for Ebay when he called. I lowered the price and after he put it through his test parameters it was a done deal.

Thank you

[Marc Schultz]

Your welcome. Glad to hear it worked out :)