Advice to a friend buying a new camera

A friend of mine posted the classic "I'm going to get my first dSLR - What should I get?" question which spawned a bunch of comments from friends chiming in about their favorite brands.  I think most people usually recommend the brand that they shoot with, but I didn't.  I shoot Canon for now but I said "Nikon or Sony", which caused him to ask why. I thought I might post the details here before they get lost to the annals of Facebook:

The Canons take pictures just fine - 100% of the pictures I've taken were with Canons! It's just an attitude thing for me now. After being a hardcore Canon user/watcher for a couple years I've figured out how Canon's marketing mind works. The lower end stuff is suitable for most uses but they always hold out the little things that would make photography more convenient for their highest-end stuff.

I'm not talking about expensive features here - I'm talking about things like 5 shot exposure bracketing, a built-in eyepiece blocker, more flexibility for exposure compensation, mirror lockup as a drive mode and not as a custom function, perhaps an actual knob for drive mode, etc.

Many of these are simple things that their highest end model has. I understand paying thousands more for actual technology, but paying thousands to change some firmware constant from 3 to 5 is insulting.   I also think that selling the intervalometer as a $150 accessory instead of building it in to the camera is insulting.

I went with Canon because of the lens selection, and that's why I'm staying with them for now. (In fact, I keep adding to my lens investment.) And I'm hoping that the recent advances by Nikon, Sony, and others will compel them to bring some of these (essentially free to engineer) features down to the mid-range.

When you buy a Canon, you're paying for the millions of dollars they've invested in CMOS image sensor fabrication and high-volume manufacturing technology. You're also paying for the labor of the one intern they hired do do their User Interface work and the tools that work in Technical Marketing.

BTW, I'm officially "cynical" about the whole Canon vs. Everyone Else battle. Just like Lance said "It's not about the bike", photography is NOT about the camera. The most important thing is that you get a usable tool that's gives you the level of flexibility you need and then GO OUT AND TAKE PICTURES!

That's by far more important that the details of which lens you buy, how much you spend, or what brand you use.

Let's talk about California Sales Tax...

It's July, which means it's time for small businesses in California to file their sales and use taxes with the State of California Board Of Equalization (BOE)  Sales tax regulations can be complicated (like everything else with the State) due to the different situations that under which photography can occur and the different forms in which it can be transferred to the customer. The simple version goes like this:  If you buy a printed photograph from me, it's taxable.  If you hire me to photograph something for you as a commercial photographer and I deliver an image to you electronically, it's not taxable.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, it isn't quite that simple and until recently the BOE was arguing that commercial photography constituted a taxable sale, even if there was no tangible item transferred.

Jeff Sednick, on behalf of the Advertising Photographers of America, has a nice update on his site here, which points to the relevant regulation from the BOE, Regulation 1540.   Note that this is different from Regulation 1528 which covers situations like if you come to me for a passport photo or you buy a piece of art and hang it on your wall.

Matting photos all day

Today was spent matting and framing photos.  The Mother In Law has a mat cutter and Aaron Brothers was having their one-penny (2 for the price of one) sale so lots of the prints that I made two weeks ago in Charlie Cramer's printing class got shiny new homes.   Now we just have to figure out a way to show them all off. Anyone want to buy a framed print???

Charlie Cramer's fine art printing class

I had the great pleasure of attending Charlie Cramer's excellent Fine Art Printing Class this past weekend, held at The Picture Element here in Santa Clara, California.  It's an intensive three day class running from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm Friday and Saturday and 9:00 to 5:00 on Sunday.  That's 32 total hours of time talking about printing, looking at prints, making prints of your work, and having your prints reviewed by classmates.  It's an intensive session to say the least and with only eight students, getting the attention of Charlie or his assistant isn't a problem at all. The first half of the class is mostly lecture, as you follow along on your own computer with what Charlie does on the projector.  We covered a lot of good Photoshop techniques for enhancing images and making them more pleasing to the eye.  By Saturday afternoon we switched to working on our own images, making test prints as we went, trying to get the most out of each image.  As the images became more refined we made larger prints, all the way up to 36" x 24".  (Or even larger for wide panoramic shots)   I worked on about 12 images which is probably more than most people did, and I ended up with about 10 nice 11 x 14 images,  a few 24 x 20 images, and a large 48 x 20 panorama.   It's safe to say that I got a lot of prints.

The main part of the class revolves around his "master file" idea and the "print, evaluate, refine, reprint" workflow.  There were a lot of Photoshop techniques to help an image's contrast, color balance, etc. that were discussed and I ended up much more comfortable with Photoshop CS4 than I had been before.  (A lot of the Photoshop interface changed with CS4 and the repetition of doing all the exercises in Charlie's book really helped it become second nature.)

If you're interested in the print as the final destination for your photography and you feel like something's lacking in your prints, then I would recommend this class whole-heartedly.  It's biased toward nature photography but the concepts carry over to any sort of photography.   I happened to get lucky and find this class being offered so close to home but he also offers it in Yosemite Valley, combined with a couple days of shooting.

Goodbye to Kodachrome

I've never shot a roll of Kodachrome in my life - In fact, the closest I've gotten to Kodachrome is loving the Paul Simon song.  But I still have a lot of respect for how groundbreaking Kodachrome has been over it's 74 year life.  The numbers person in me is sad they didn't press on for just one more year so they could say that it was around for an even 75 years. Anybody want to take bets on how long Canon's CR2 file format will be around???

New Eye-Fi, and some Canon vs. Nikon flame fodder

Great news out from Eye-Fi today!  A new version of their card allows transfers of RAW files!   You can read about it at Rob Galbraith. In addition to RAW support, you can apparently transfer files directly to your computer using an ad-hod wi-fi network now, instead of having to transfer to some web service like Flickr.  So, for $150 you can transfer your RAW files to your laptop while you're shooting, with no need to pass them through the Internets or somebody else's service.  This is getting closer and closer to Canon's $900 wi-fi accessory.

Now I wonder which will happen first:  Eye-fi coming out with a Compact Flash version or their cards or Nikon and Canon dropping CF altogether.  Mybet is on the second, even though I really like Compact Flash as a format for it's speed, larger physical size, and durability.

My tech-savvy friend Philip with his Digital Rebel (with SD card slot) is probably going to be loving this.

In other news, this Photography Bay article details how easy it is to make a stop-motion video using a Nikon D5000, because it has an interval timer function built in.  Stop motion videos are fun to make and having an interval timer mode built in to a dSLR is pretty much a no brainer.  Too bad that with Canon you have to buy a bulky, expensive $140 accessory to do this.  Why? Canon, why?