Catching up on Kitties

I don't seem to take as many photos of the kitties as I used to with the good camera, partly because I am not shooting anything (working too much), partly because they are being SO bad lately (literally trying to kill each other as they adjust their pecking order) and because as much as I love the 5D mark III the thing I hate about it, is that the active focal point is almost always black, it doesn't turn red when it is active and trying to focus. Lets just think about how hard it is to get your focus point on the right spot on a BLACK cat, when the point is BLACK! It's more than a little frustrating, I really hope that Canon comes up with a fix for this!










Stanley made a bed of my Dad's bag when they came for a visit in June

Longwood June 2012

Back in June a friend of mine from work Karyn and I took a trip to Longwood on a weeknight after work.  She had just gotten a new macro lens for her Sony mirrorless camera and wanted to test it out.  As cool as those cameras are, watching her use it for macros made me really glad for my big bulky DSLR.  Hard as it is to nail focus with macros, it's much easier with a DSLR.

We mostly focused on shooting outside to start, I rarely get to be there in the evening and I wanted to play with the light. 






I didn't even notice the little bug on this while I was shooting!






I was really excited to get to play with a longer lens with the waterlilies! Though I need to go back earlier in the day when there will be more light.


Eventually I had to switch from my 180L to my old standby 100L (thank goodness for IS) as we were losing light, I just couldn't keep shooting at 1/400 and f/4!








The new light installation they have going on for the summer had just started up that week and it looked amazing! I can't wait to go back in August with Amanda and shoot that at night!

Bon Air Park Macros

The last weekend in April I took a trip down to Virginia with some of my favorite photographers. My friend Audrey and I carpooled down and meet Melissa
in the DC suburbs of VA where she was doing a couple of photo shoots. During one of her sessions where she didn't need help wrangling the dogs I wandered off to shoot some macros in this little garden by the parking lot in the park.

Early 5D Mark iii Macros

I took a couple of macros right after I got my 5D mark III but I didn't get around to really posting them until later since I didn't have a version of Lightroom that would work with them. Right now I am using one of the Lightroom 4 release canidates and it is working well, now that I am getting used to the huge changes in version 4 versus version 3.

5D Mark III - First Thoughts

Friday night I went to pick up my new baby from UPS, my lovely new 5D mark iii. I have since spent a ton of time pouring over the manual playing with the settings and taking random photos. First impression?  Love it!

Highlights:

• The AF is so fast that it locks and shoots the photo before I think it could have locked focus
• The ISO looks really good on the LCD, but it is hard to judge without being able to take a raw file into LR. The JPGs I have coverted in the camera without noise reduction generally look good but it is hard to compare to the 5dm2 at this point
• There are so many options, especially with the autofocus it might take me months to go through all the settings and see what works best for me.

And now the important part, pictures! I can't take these into LR, not even LR4 is updated to convert them yet, so I used the ability to do a raw conversion in camera. These are SOOC, other than minor WB adjustments on some as part of the in camera conversion, but no exposure adjustments or noise reduction or sharpening.





A 100% crop of the eyes on both of those photos.  Both images were taken at ISO 3200 f/2 1/200, with my 135L.

Finally a shot at ISO 6400, which is rather underexpose, but Gibson is too cute.



And a link to the full sized file if you want to look.

It's noisy, but actually sharp, the noise would be a lot better at the right exposure and with some noise reduction. Hopefully I can do a real review and comparison with the 5dm2 soon. I will probably shoot the images soon, even if I can't do anything with them for a while.