My continuing love affair.......with the Canon 7D. Enhanced by the 60mm efs and a few LED lights

I'm taking a risk today.  I'm posting from my laptop and the screen isn't nearly as well calibrated as the monitor in my office.  I'll assume this looks like my model, Selena, and that the flesh tones are somewhere in the ballpark.  Apologies if it's bright purple.....

I don't have a scientific method of measuring the different ways in which various cameras handle color, I just know what colors I like to see and always how I like the contrast of the files rendered.  Now I'll head into heretical territory.  I recently did a big job for an ad agency.  24 portraits in two days.  On site.  I used two cameras.  My main camera was a Canon 5Dmk2 with a 100mm f2 lens tacked onto the front.  The other camera was my old Kodak DSLR/n with an even older Nikon 135mm f2.8 on the business end.  The exercise went like this:  Shoot the bulk of the frames with the Canon camera and, when I felt like I had what I wanted, pull up the Kodak and shoot an additional ten frames.  All the frames were shot under the same lights,  Profoto monolights in the 600 w/s and 300 w/s varieties.  I used a gray Lastolite target and did a custom white balance for each of the cameras.  I shot both of them in RAW.  I processed both sets of files in Lightroom 3.0

And what to my wondering eyes did appear?  Softer, smoother, more accurate tonalities and colors out of the Kodak camera.  Much easier to post process into pleasing files.  And whether it was a different "shoulder/toe" curve parameter or just more dynamic range, the Kodak beat the snot out of the Canon 5d2 in terms of holding juicy detail in slight overexposures.  Now, if I really dig in and spend the time I can get the two cameras to look a lot a like but when I show the files as 12 by 18 inch prints my art director friends choose the Kodak prints every time.  Every time.  The Kodak came onto the market in 2004.  In camera years that's like a decade ago.  The Canon is barely 18 months old.  Amazing.

In it's defense the Canon 5d2 has great detail and for most things, very decent color.  But it was enough to shake my nascent confidence in Canon's supposed supremacy as a portrait camera.  So I was expecting the 7D from Canon to be no great shakes.  But I was wrong.  When I go thru the same process and do the same white balances with the 7D it creates files that, while not quite as detailed as the 5d2, are much more pleasing in the eyes of this portrait photographer.  And I'm still trying to figure out why that is.  It's a newer sensor but not by much.  They have the same Digic 4 processors.  And the lenses are the same.  But I guess it's one of those things I'll never have a solid metric for because I'm pretty sure the guys at Canon don't want to get into a dissing war between their various cameras.

Suffice it to say that I started shooting with the 7D more and more.  That moved me to buy an interesting lens, against my better judgement.  It's the 60mm macro, EFS.  EFS means that it only covers the optical circle of the Canon cropped frame cameras.  Won't even fit on the front of a 5D2.  But it just seemed like the perfect portrait focal length for the 7D and other cropped sensor cameras.  It's nice and small and fits on the body well.  Not too front heavy.  And it opens up to 2.8.  Here's a photo sample from last week:

It's shot at 3.2 and some slow shutter speed but it looks good and handles well.  The combination works for a lot of the faster, candid portraits I sometimes do and it doubles as a macro rig when I need to get close.  The other two shots in this blog were done with the 70-200mm f2 (non-IS) which I mentioned recently.  It's an incredibly good lens and, if someone handed me $2400 and asked me to buy myself another long zoom I'd pass right by the new 2.8 type two, snap up another $600 f4 and stick the rest into something else.

In a previous review I wrote at length about the handling of the 7D and the responsiveness of the auto focus but my recent romance with LED panels has caused me to think more about the color handling characteristics of various camera models instead of the more common threads of discussion which tend to center around resolution and dynamic range.  I've found that both the 7D and the new 60D are much better in AWB than any other Canon camera I've had the chance to handle.  Much better.  And when I'm in the studio shooting under the non-continuous spectrum of my wacky LED lights I find that the cameras, when left to their own devices, hit the proper white balance right off the mark, unlike the 5d2.  If you throw the Kodak I mentioned into the ring you'd have the opposite of the AWB Bell Curve.  In the absence of a custom white balance shooting with the Kodak is like shooting thru a kaleidoscope.


So I did a little reading to see what I could find out.  Here's the factoid that I'm hanging on to:  Both the 7D and the 60D make use of Canon's Intelligent Focus Color Luminosity metering system.  It's part of the autofocus system but it uses color sensors to more effectively understand what's in the  frame.  It's only a suspicion on my part but I believe that this new measurement tool is also somehow tied into the overall camera white balance tools and this gives the newer cameras an edge over the other cameras in the system that don't share this technology.


Let's talk about flash for a moment.  I know a lot of wedding photographers swear by their 5dmk2's and I can understand why.  It's a good camera with a sensor that's capable of capturing a lot of detail.  But when it comes to flash and autofocus in dimly lit venues I can't see why these photographers don't rush to pull the 7D out of their bags.  The flash performance is a full generation ahead of the 5d2.  The autofocus lock on is two generations better and probably on par with the system in the 1Dmk4.  The flash makes use of the same IFCL metering system that I talked about above and in combination with the flash exposure lock button flash becomes as easy as shooting Nikon.


I put the camera and 580 ex2 flash thru their paces in the dimly lit ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel last thurs. night.  Legendary attorney, Joe Jamail, took the podium in a crowded ballroom to give a speech about UT's president, Dr. Bill Powers.  Before he launched into his speech he squinted at the spotllights illuminating the small stage and asked, "Can you turn those darned things down?"  They did.  And it dropped the overall illumination a lot.  Even though Mr. Jamail was in a dark suit and the stage was backed with black curtains the camera/flash combination did a great job nailing the exposure using the FEL spot pre-metering and locking in the settings.  I try to take only a few flash shots because, no matter how discreet you try to be, it still gets annoying.  I switch over to a preset custom banks which changes my settings to 2800 K color temperature, ISO 3200, spot metering and "Camera Neutral" color setting.  And I will say that, with a little noise reduction edged in, the camera performs quite well at what would have been extreme nose bleed territory for a cropped frame camera only a year ago.......


So where does this new found appreciation put me in terms of grabbing cameras for assignment?  Well, if resolution, sharpness and final reproduction size are all critical my choice will be the 5D2, hands down.  If I have to get the tiniest slice of focus and put everything else out of focus I'll also grab for the same camera.  But if I can shoot under 1600 ISO, need fast AF, need good out of camera color balance and good white balance, and if handling is critical it's the 7D all the way.  With my 20,  my new 35 f2 and the 60mm macro EFS I've got a nice, small and light "classic" photojournalist's set up that doesn't break the bank.  Throw in a couple of wide ranging zooms like the 15-85 and the 70-200 f4 and a 60D as a back up body and I have system I'd feel comfortable with on a very large portion of my jobs.


Thank the photo dieties,  they all take the same batteries.  Just a few random observations from a week of daily shooting....

Lit with a single LED panel blasted (ha, ha) through a Chimera diffusion scrim.

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

Photographers tend to talk a lot about lighting and gadgets. We should also talk about just looking at the light that's already there.

©2010 Kirk Tuck

Photographers, as a demographic, love to play with the tools and the toys and I am no exception to that generalization.  We hit a new location and the first thing that comes to mind is generally, "Where should I put the lights?"  And, if you have watched many of the DVD's by photographer/instructors or you've taken workshops from lighting pros you can be forgiven for coming to believe that "it's not really professional photography unless there are lights involved."  

Another idea that you'll come away with once you've watched the workshop dynasty give the rosiest case scenario of the business of taking pictures is that no job can ever be done without an assistant.  And I guess if you buy into the first concept:  All lights all the time.... It seems logical that a big support network would make all work more efficient.  But I'm here to tell you that this is all somewhat counterintuitive.

Very few paying jobs are comprised of complicated sets at beaches involving giant scrims, big lights with generators and lots of thin young girls in swimwear.  In fact, if you live outside of South Beach Miami or Venice Beach you will probably starve to death in the search for this kind of work.  But it plays well at workshops because it's wildly the "best case scenario" most aspiring photographers can imagine.  

The reality is that maybe 90% of commercial (non-retail or direct to comsumer; like weddings) photography is done for small and large companies that have products and services to sell.  They also have marketing budgets that are predicated not upon your innate genius but by what value the photographs will ultimately bring to their table.

There are two ways to look at commercial work:  You can be a "whaler" and only go after the big jobs.  Jobs with lots of production and enough potential usage to generate big fees.  Or, you can fly fish.  Cast and land enough fish, week in and week out and you'll do okay.  Whaling sounds great.  A beefy advertising job might net an upper level photography $25,000 or more for a week's worth of shooting while the fly fishers are lucky these days to get $1,800 for a day.  But whaling is predicated on you being able to wait and wait and wait.

I've always taken the fly fishing approach.  Cast and reel in jobs.  And mostly they are one and two day experiences.  Sometimes a job with a bit of travel will take a week.  And many times I'm documenting placing and people in their environments.  Instead of creating a whole lighting design we're coming in like ninjas and leveraging existing light with a few little lights.  That was really the whole premise of my book, Minimalist Lighting.  It was less about how to travel light than it was about how to mix just enough of your light with the light already in a scene to make it work.

And much as I hate to admit it, right now clients are looking for photographers who can come into a facility and create the least disruption and still come away with the goods.  That's a strong incentive to travel light.  But traveling light is no substitute to actually taking time to look at the light and see if you really need to add anything at all. (A statement that makes lighting equipment manufacturers cringe....)

When I went to this printing facility in Ft. Worth I took a case of lights along with me in a Think Tank, Airport Securtity roller case.  I had five or six flashes, a bucket of radio triggers and lots of little diffusers and grid spots.  I had enough filter material to match just about every source.  But when I set up my camera and took a look at most of the things that we wanted to photograph I found that the available light worked really, really well.  

During the course of two days I took the flashes out only when I set up and shot formal portraits of the executive staff against a seamless background.  The rest of the time I kept my eyes open for the right angles and the right existing light.  I knew I'd be working in a 100 or 200 thousand square foot plant and there was no way (and no budget) for lighting up the whole place, or even a large corner of it.

We got the shots we needed with a camera and my most important accessory, my tripod.  I chose not to use an assistant because the budget for the project was tight (aren't they all these days?) but mostly because there wasn't much for an assistant to do.  The "seeing" part is what I'm supposed to do.  And the day I can't carry a wooden tripod and a camera bag by myself is probably the day I should hang it all up and go back to teaching.

I guess this long ramble is really just a reminder that so much of what we do can be done with the simplest gear and can be done unaided.  Rather than ever cutting your fee it's smarter to cut other line items in your budgets.  And if the scene is already perfectly lit you don't need to waste time re-inventing the wheel.  Just get out your gray target card, do a custom white balance and start shooting.  Perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from everything being (over)lit to an appreciation for natural light.  Even when it comes from a florescent fixture in the ceiling.....

©2010 Kirk Tuck

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions:

   

   

   

   

The tools are inevitably entwined around the art. Here are some observations about a few tools.

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

Kasimir Malevich, Cubo-Futurist, Suprematist

Somewhere in this collection of 400+ blog posts is an article testifying to my love of the 50mm focal length.  Even though I divested myself of most of my Nikon gear over a year ago there were several pieces that I just couldn't bear to part with.  Two immediately come to mind:  The 50mm 1.1.2 ais  lens and the 55mm f 2.8 Micro lens.  I have adapters that let me use either lens on my Canon bodies and on my Olympus Pen cameras, and I do so often.  I can't really tell you why I like them so much but I'm sure it has something to do with the nostalgia of manual focus and the fact that both of these lenses have proven themselves to be sharp and well corrected; no matter what body I put them on.  I have a 25mm 2.8 Olympus lens that I use on the regular 4:3rds bodies and, with an adapter, on the Pen cameras (which I still own, still shoot and still love).  And I have three Canon dedicated 50's in the drawer, as well.

But I've been working through the Canon system and I've discovered two things:  1.  I like the cropped frame cameras like the 60D and the 7D more than the 5D2 even though it has the bigger (and supposedly better) full frame sensor.  2.  I wanted a lens that was in the equivalent range of 50 to 60mm for that format.  I don't always use primes but when I do I want them to conform to the way I see and not the other way around.  I've come to understand that no matter how hard you try to make something work it's not going to work unless your brain is willing to accept it.  And my brain is really bossy.  When it wants to see things in a certain way it gets bitchy about substitutions.

I looked at everything on the market and finally settled on a Canon 35mm f2.  It corresponds to a 56mm lens on a full frame camera which puts it right into the middle of my sweet spot.  The price is good and it's usable on my full frame camera.  I hadn't had a chance to really break the lens in until today so, after doing some mandatory yard work,  I grabbed the 7D and the 35mm and went out for a Sunday walk around downtown Austin.

The lens is probably the lightest lens I own.  It has no special features.  No special glass.  No IS.  No big hood.  No bragging rights for the aperture.  And I fell in love with it the moment I looked through it.  It's sooooo neutral.  No wide angle affectations.  No "portrait-y" feel.  Just a solid, middle of the road focal length and no big anomalies to speak of.  It focuses quickly with the 60d and the 7D.  And, at 3.5 and 5.6 most test reports show it matching the performance of the 35mm 1.4 pretty handily.  Did I try the 30mm Sigma?  Yes.  I owned one back in the Nikon days and found it to be no great shakes.  I sure wasn't interested in doing it again.  It's sharp in the middle and by the time you hit 5.6 it's probably as sharp all over as this lens, but at twice the price.

So, what does this lens get me that's so special?  Absolutely nothing.  And that's it's charm.  By nature of it's middle of the road focal length and neutral imaging performance it becomes transparent on many levels.  I don't lean on an absurd focal length in order to "pull off" an image.  It's fast enough for just about anything I shoot and when I stop it down to the middle aperture range it's as sharp as I could want it to be.  Best of all, it was less than $300.

As a representative of the Visual Science Lab I'm officially declaring this lens to be the prime lens of choice for people who want a middle focal length for street shooting, general artistic stuff and for wise shoppers.  I'm thinking of hot gluing it to the front of my Canon 7D and shooting it until the next cropped frame successor hits the shelves......

I can guess why everyone loves exotic zoom lenses and exciting, extreme focal lengths but I'm finding a lot of good, cheap lenses in the Canon line up that I think are overlooked.  For example, when most people consider actual 50mm lenses the "wish" lens is the 50mm 1.1.2 L.  But why?  It's rare that you'll find subject matter that works well at the maximum aperture of that lens and it weighs a ton.  And costs even more.  The 50mm 1.4 is widely acknowledged to be soft at 1.4 and f2 but sharpens up nicely at f4. And that's a good thing?  So, people buy them only to stop them down?  I think a sloppy 1.4 made sense back in the manual focus days because the limited depth of field made it easier to see when a lens popped in and out of focus.  But with the dominant use of autofocus?  Doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Then there's the "nifty fifty", Canon's 50mm 1.8.  I have one.  I use it and I find that it too needs to be stopped down to at least 2.8 and really to f4 before it behaves and delivers good performance over most of the frame.

Hell, my $700 Carl Zeiss 50mm 1.4 falls into the same pit of performance as the above two lenses.  So why is it that, when we're out shopping for opinions on all the forae, no one ever gets around to mentioning the 50mm 2.5 macro lens?  I played with one, found it to be sharp at f2.8 (sharper than all the lenses mentioned above) even better at f4 and remarkably crisp at 5.6.  And it's cheaper than all but the nifty fifty.  What gives?  Is it really so declasse to use a non-USM lens?  And it too is well under $300.  I was so impressed I picked on up.  And guess what?  It's light enough to keep in the bag and take anywhere.

Here's my new, small kit for walking around the streets shooting:  The Canon 7D (the small professional, cropped frame version of the 1Dmk4, really) the 20mm f2.8, the 35mm f2.0, the 50mm 2.5 macro.  When I want something a little longer I pack my 100 f2.0 as well.  With these three or four focal lengths I feel like I can do just about anything photographic in my style.  And all four lenses run less than the new 70-200 2.8 or even a single 85mm 1.1.2 lens.  Guarantee you'll have more fun with these than any group of zooms that cover the same lengths and you'll be doing it with lenses that let you shoot at wider apertures than even the L zooms will with very, very good results.

I shot a function, an event, with the 7D last week.  It does a better job with flash than the 5D2.  The focus locks on quicker in subdued light and the finder is just as beautiful.  I've learned how to lock in a flash pre-flash spot reading and get the same kind of results with flash that I used to get with the Nikon gear.  I understand the general fascination with full frame equipment but I'll readily admit that you could do endless amounts of very professional work with the cropped frame cameras.  At least that's my recent experience.  I'm glad I have both.  I'll save the 5 for picky clients.  For myself?  The 60D and 7D are mostly interchangeable and great.  I'm happy to have them as tools.  The lack of inference makes them invisible to me when I shoot.  I like that.

The next thing up falls into the category of Best Lighting Thing I've Bought for Next to No Money.

It didn't seem like much of a risk when I ponied up $64 for the 160 LED panel I bought from Amazon recently.  I think one plant in China makes all of the 160 bulb panels and then five or ten distributors buy them up and brand them.  At least they all look identical.....  I call this.....my 160 LED panel.

And I've used it on a full day of corporate location photography with especially good results.  The light is pretty powerful, runs for an hour and a half on a rechargeable camcorder battery and has a dimmer control.  I'm working on a video right now and find that two of these panels take care of about 50% of my lighting needs on location.  When more light is called for I can lean on all the "plug in the wall" big panels I've accumulated.  I even stuck one in the camera bag when I went to shoot event stills the other night at the Four Seasons but I didn't have the experience with fast moving events to use continuous light on an important shoot for a client.  But I've been reading a blog from Neil van Niekirk and he's doing just that.  He's using the small panels for quick fill and accent lights on wedding shoots and so far the results look really great.

Once I've shot a few projects that way I'll post some more details.  Until then you might want to check out Neil's blog here.


   

Stumbling around downtown I discovered one thing about portraits. I like to photograph people who look smart.

 s.

Hanging out downtown with Selena.  We shot on Second Street and Third street.  Love the glasses.  Love the serious/smart look.  We stuck with open shade and shot with the Canon 7D.  My lens of choice (for the whole day, it seems) was the 70-200 f4 L (the non IS version which actually uses cooler glass...).  I brought along my tripod and used it just like my seat belt.......all the time.

It was the perfect counterpoint to a day of meetings, photo shoots at law offices and medical practices.  No lights anywhere.  Not even LEDs.

Portrait of the day.

This is a classic one light portrait in a style I've done for a long time.  I was happy to be able to photography Selena.  She's a musician and an actor.  Very professional and patient.  I used a 4 foot by 4 foot Chimera Panel with a diffusion cloth as close to her as I could get it.  The light comes from a 1,000 bulb, ePhotoInc., LED panel used at full power.

I used a Canon 7D with the 70-200mm L f4.0 zoom lens.  ISO 200.  We went on to shoot other set ups but this was one of my favorites.  Hope everyone is happy and busy.  KT