CalevPhoto

A trip to the Museum of Flight

For some strange reason, we never bothered to take Eitan and Nathan to the Museum of Flight.  While figuring out what to do one weekend, we decided it was time to take them.

Of course, I couldn’t resist taking my camera and decided to be a bit creative with the shots.

In particular I found the exhausts on the planes to be rather interesting.  The museum itself is very interesting and had quite a few planes for the kids to look at.  We wound up spending five hours there!

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Equipment that I hope to buy

In my previous post, I covered the equipment that I currently use.  The following is a list of what I am still planning to get.

Canon TS-E 17 – This is simply too tempting, especially for my real estate work.  I am currently saving for this lens, which is good as it is not out yet.  I hope to have it by the end of the year, even though it is quite pricy.

Canon 600mm F4 IS – I will most likely start saving for this lens after I buy my TS-E 17.  I will use the TS-E 17 for real estate shoots that will help pay for this monster.  I’m still debating between this and a microscope, but the around town opportunities to use this are just too tempting.

Canon 135mm 2L – I am a bit conflicted about this lens and am unsure it will truly be on my list.  The issue is that I already heavily use my 70-200 4L IS for pictures of my kids and I’m not sure I will have room in the bag for this lens.

Microscope – The problem is I don’t want any microscope – but a DIC microscope, which will set me back more than the 600L.

Really Right Stuff pano kit – I love doing panoramas and the only thing keeping me from getting it right now is the price and the two lenses in front of it.   I almost bought it a few months ago but chose to buy a monopod instead – which I do not regret.

Singh-ray vari-ND – I haven’t done much landscape work lately, but I hope that will change.  When it does I hope to have one of these to do some long shutter shots.

Confessions of an equipment junkie

I admit it.  I am an equipment junkie.  I want all of the best photo equipment and lenses no matter how much they cost and I love showing my equipment off.  In particular I love hearing now that’s a camera, as people walk by.

You know that you are the same, so it’s best to admit it now and get it over with!  Therefore, with that spirit in mind I will discuss the gear that I currently use.

Camera:

Canon 5D Mark II – I really like this camera and have already discussed it at great length on this blog.

Lenses:

Canon 70-200 4L IS – This is my walk around lens and the lens I most commonly use for shots of my kids.  I bought it over the 2.8 because it is much lighter and the IS is better.

Canon MP-E 65 – This is the lens I use for the majority of my insect shots.

Canon 180L Macro – I use this less often than my MP-E 65, but it is my main lens for larger insects and flowers.

Canon 16-35 2.8L II – This is the main lens I use for real estate and for landscape shots while traveling.

Canon 50mm 1.4 – I rarely use this lens, but it does come in handy for low light situations.

Canon 100-400 4.5-5.6L – This is my zoo and wildlife lens.

Lighting:

Canon 580EX – This is the first flash I bought and I still prefer it in some ways to the 580EX II, which sometimes has difficulties with the Pocketwizards.

Canon 580EX II – It’s nice to control the flash from the camera, but otherwise it is no big upgrade.

Canon MT-24EX – This is the flash I use for most of my macro shots.

Pocketwizard MultiMAX – I love the added versatility over the Pocketwizard Plus II, but I rarely use multiple lights in my shots these days.

Other:

Really Right Stuff L Bracket – IMHO their L brackets are the best.

Gitzo 1348 tripod – The tripod is a bit big, but is extremely sturdy.  It is great for real estate and for around town, but not so great for traveling.

Markins M20 head – Great head for less price than the Really Right Stuff head.

Gitzo GM-5561 monopod – Expensive but amazingly small and strong for a monopod.  I almost always have this on me.

Really Right Stuff Tilt head – Works great when tracking birds or other things.

Kirk Macro Rail – I shoot most of my macro shots handheld so I now use this mainly for panorama shots – to adjust the nodal point of the lens.  It’s not a bad macro rail but I would probably buy the Really Right Stuff one if I had to do it over again.

Lumiquest 80/20 system – I almost always have this on my flash.

Wimberley macro brackets – When I am using a flash with my 180L, these are always on.  I also use them for drop shots.

In my next post I will cover the gear I hope to get.

A hike at Twin Falls State Park

As those of you who have kids will know, a chance to get out and take some shots around town is a real treat.  Therefore, when a coworker asked if I would like to go hiking at Twin Falls State Park and my wife said OK, I jumped on the opportunity.

The park is not very far from Seattle and is one of the many nice waterfalls we have around here.  This is one of the great benefits of living here.  While back East we had Niagara Falls (which I have seen perhaps a hundred times but never photographed) after that the waterfalls taped off a bit.  Not that case here – as we have a good number of waterfalls over a hundred feet tall.

Ironically, I feel that the best shots from the trip were not of the waterfalls itself.  They are nice waterfalls, but I believe it is necessary to get down to the waterfall level for a truly nice shot.  Unfortunately conditions were not favorable that day towards doing that. Continue Reading…

A so so photograph, but interesting story

As some of you know, each Friday I organize a small photography shoot by three ponds that are next to the building where I work.  Although small, there is a good deal of wildlife here and it is interesting to see how the area changes as the seasons go by.

This isn’t a particularly interesting picture of a millipede.  I have much better millipede shots and it was one of a handful of shots I got that day.  This particular millipede is quite small and I had placed it on some moss nearby for a more interesting shot.

However, the story behind the shot is a bit more interesting.

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Another trip to the zoo

Now that I have my 100-400 lens, going to the zoo is all the more a pleasure.  I enjoy taking pictures of whatever animals happen to be photogenic that day and of course the kids don’t mind it either.

This shot I got of a male gorilla that did not seem to be in a good mood.  The gorillas at the zoo almost always provide some interesting shots.  I have to admit that this is one of my favorite shots from the recent trips to the zoo.  The following shot is from a different profile. Continue Reading…

Congrats to Canon on the TS-E 17!

Recently it has been a bit of a bummer being a Canon user.  Granted, the 5D Mark II is a great camera and competes very well with the D700, but every other camera in their SLR line seems to take a back seat these days.

Therefore it was nice to see Canon still has a bit of ingenuity up their sleaves in the TS-E 17 F4 lens.  One area where Canon still has an advantage over Nikon is in their lenses.  Canon simply has far more lenses and far more good primes specifically.  Nikon has a few lenses Canon doesn’t – such as the 14-24 and the 200-400, but the Canon lenses I use most often – the 70-200/4 IS and the MP-E 65 – have no equivalents in Nikon.

Still, Canon has the tendency lately to sit back on their laurels and let Nikon catch up.  That is what happened with high ISO capabilities and I expected the same to occur for lenses – where Canon’s strategy lately has been to upgrade existing lenses.

This is not the case with the TS-E 17 – which is the ultimate interior photography lens.  Already I am salivating at the thought of taking real estate pictures with this lens – though I’m having more than a little trouble convincing my wife that it is worth it!

I had planned to buy the TS-E 24 at some time, but I wasn’t crazy about it.  I had heard that the lens was not great optically and 24mm is a great distance from my 16-35 that I normally use.  I did use a friend’s TS-E 24 briefly in a house I photographed, but I put the lens away because I needed something much wider.  The TS-E 17 fits the bill exactly.

I hope that this is a sign for the future – that Canon will keep innovating.  They now have another lens with no equivalent in other systems and I suspect a good number of interior photographers will buy a Canon camera if they are not using one just to be able to use this lens.

Now if I can just figure out where to get $2500.

I’m alive!

Yes, I know this blog has been rather bare lately.  Things have been extremely busy between work and home and I haven’t had much time to get to this blog.

Still, I have had time to take a good number of pictures lately.  I hope to have the chance to display many of them soon.

To the Zoo, with the 100-400

For a birthday gift at the end of last year, I bought the Canon 100-400 lens.  It has been rather cheap lately, so I couldn’t resist getting a zoom longer than my 70-200 4L IS.  Of course, my luck will be that they do wind up upgrading it later this year, but if that is the case I should be able to get a good price for mine since I bought it at a good price.

I also bought a Gitzo monopod together with the RRS tilt head.  I will review these at a later time, but from experience I knew that if I wanted a sharp picture, I needed some kind of stabilization.

I’m not much for taking shots of teddy bears and diagrams in the house to test a lens.  I prefer to take it in the field and give it a try.

The following are the shots I got.  At the end I will give my impressions of the lens.

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Using flash above 1/200

Recently while taking some drop photos, I wondered whether I could increase the shutter speed past 1/200.  With high speed sync, I often took pictures at 1/250 and 1/300 – but I wanted to see if I could exceed it.

I had thought a bit about using a PocketWizard MultiMAX, but after reading through the manual and reading about others’ experiences, it doesn’t seem that it can get me much past 1/300.  Therefore I came up with a rather simple idea that amazingly worked.

I setup my MT-24EX on my 180L and used it to trigger to 580EX flashes.  The MT-24EX was set as the master and both 580EX flashes (actually one 580EX and one 580EX II) were set as slaves.  I placed both 580EX flashes on the end of Wimberley macro brackets – which held the weight fine.  I then set the MT-24EX to high speed sync.

The entire camera loaded thus was quite heavy and large.  I suspect in the field it wouldn’t be too practical – though a monopod may help things.  My goal was basically to blast the subject with light.  Since I was watching the kids at home that day, I couldn’t go outside to try with a live drop so I hooked up the hose on the faucet with a rubber band.

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