[Analogy]

I’m selling the 100-400 because for what I shoot the 70-200 works better. I rarely even go tighter than 200mm and the light loss from zooming in just kills me in low light (which is where I do most of my shooting). I’d rather have a 2.8 lens that doesn’t lose light when I zoom in because of all the low-light shooting I do. If I ever do need more tele reach I can throw one of Canon’s extenders on it. Or just, you know, walk closer.

Differences of a stop or two don’t sound like much when you’re talking about aperture, but remember that every extra stop of aperture I get means I can double my shutter speed and motion freezing ability. Take this shot for example. It’s 1/80 f/5.6 at 150mm. With the 70-200 I could have shot that at f/2.8 for a shutter speed of 1/320 and eliminated that ugly motion blur.

PHOTO GEEK MODE ENGAGE
As far as the extenders, they do lose light, but at most focal lengths the 70-200 with an extender is still faster than the 100-400. For example 70-200 + 1.4x is 100-280mm f/4. That beats the the 100-400 by a third of a stop at the wide end, and is still f/4 at 280mm, where the 100-400 is f/5.6. With the 2x extender the 70-200 is 140-400mm f/5.6, which the 100-400 beats by a third of a stop with f/5 from 140-250mm, but ties it with f/5.6 from 250-400mm.
As far as sharpness, the extender does lose a little bit but not enough I think to turn keepers into rejects. If I were printing billboards I’d probably worry about it more, but if I was doing that I could afford to buy a ton of primes and extra camera bodies. =D
PHOTO GEEK MODE DISENGAGE

I agree it’s a good idea to invest in the best equipment you can possibly get your hands on. While it may feel more comfortable to gradually step up over time, you’re really costing yourself more money in the end buy buying gear only to end up replacing it later. The thing is if you spend all the money now on high-end gear, you will never have to spend money for gear ever again. In my case, I can’t really afford to spend all the money at once, so I have to wait a couple months to save up for a new lens. It means my lens kit will probably take a year or two to build, and meanwhile I’ll have to come up with creative ways to make what I have work for the situation, but in the end I’ll have everything I need without spending any more money than necessary.

I started this philosophy when I got into music, my first drum set was a piece of crap just to see if I had any interest, but my next one was a very high end custom kit that I managed to nab very cheap used. Same thing with bass, I actually learned on someone else’s bass (they desperately needed a bass player), but when I joined another band to play bass in it I went out and bought (again used) a high end rig that will last me forever.

About Canon changing the mount, I doubt that’s going to happen… the original reason for the mount change was to start fresh with a mount designed from the ground up for electronically coupled focus and aperture instead of shoehorning these features into a mechanically coupled mount. I don’t see what features Canon could want to add that would require a new mount.

[Analogy]

Trust me, eating Ramen for the next 5 months will be totally worth that setup. I love my 30D and wish I could have babies with it. I’m saving up for the 24-70 myself, and as soon as I sell my 100-400 I’m going to get the 70-200 f2.8 IS. So we’ll be kind of like gear twins.

[Analogy]

I know it’s a bit of an old thread (Jeez, February, how to people find these old threads to bring back to the top?), but…

No offense, but it’s not exactly masters degree in CS stuff. Lots of people manage to do it who are no more than average computer users. In terms of computer skill it’s something like being able to cook in real life, a skill that’s not particularly obscure or rare. Even if you’re not Chef Pierre you can still follow a recipe without knowing exactly how everything works.

Anyone who can manage to go through the steps of posting a message on this forum can manage to post a Farktography entry. Just follow the incredibly clear directions that have been made available. If you can’t follow simple directions, well, maybe the internet isn’t the place for you.

Sorry to hear about your divorce, man, at least she didn’t take your camera.

[Analogy]

I suggest looking at what automatic settings the camera picks for the same picture depending on the mode. Use a tripod for consistency.

My guess is that it tries to stop down the aperture for depth of field.

[Analogy]

To make room for me. 😀 I just looked and I’ve broken into the best average standings list. Okay I’m at the bottom, but I’m IN THE LIST!

Can’t help you with your issue though.

[Analogy]

You know, browser resizing looking terrible has been an issue as long as web browsers have been around… I just realized, why do none of the browsers implement some kind of nicer-looking resampling in this age of multi-gigahertz, multi-core processors? Doesn’t have to be bicubic resampling, it just has to look better than it does right now.

[Analogy]

For the last contest I used an older photo that was already in my Picasa account, and Picasa will only resize to 144, 288, 400 or 800 pixels wide when you hotlink to it, so I used the 800 pixel version and manually added “width=700” to the image tag when I posted it. No problems. Well, except for the picture looking like crap due to browser resizing.

[Analogy]

I whipped up a quick and dirty example using a bottle of Mike’s I had lying around:

Click to see it in my Picasa gallery.

Here’s the lighting setup:

Again, click for larger. Just two lamps fitted with regular household lightbulbs, two sheets of letter-sized paper, some tape, and a couple TV trays. Voila! It may take some tweaking to get the right ratio between the background lighting and the lighting on the subject. If the picture mattered I would have brought in a third lamp to fill in the left side, but I was lazy and didn’t want to scrounge around the house.

You can make a completely seamless white background by using a larger piece of paper and bending it so that part of it lies flat on the table where the subject can sit on it, then it curves up to form a vertical backdrop. I just had letter-sized paper on me so I had to make do with this.

Be warned, the camera’s tungsten white balance will be too warm, and auto white balance will be too. You have to use your camera’s manual white balance function, or the eyedropper white balance in your RAW tool.

[Analogy]

Yeah, my main suggestion would be instead of lighting it with a light directly behind, hang a piece of paper behind the bottle and shine a light at the paper from behind it to create a solid backdrop for the glass to refract. You can also hang and light other pieces of paper around the bottle to create reflections. If you want a black background, you can use a paper to either side behind the bottle and just outside the frame, which should produce nice white outlines around the edge of the bottle to separate it from the background. The actual light sources can be anything. I use desk lamps for a lot of my small object photography. Brightness isn’t an issue because the objects aren’t moving and I can use a tripod for long exposures. If I want one light to be brighter than another, I can move it closer to or further away from the subject.

The ability to control the light in your scene is probably the single most important skill a photographer should have. Strobist is a good place to learn about photographic lighting techniques that won’t break the bank.

[Analogy]

Drew spilled beer on the servers again…

[Analogy]

No no, the exposure is right on in that picture. I was intentionally going for the rim lit look. But pull out your eyedropper tool and sample the “whites” in the picture. Due to the white balance correction I performed, the whites were turned blue, which ISN’T desireable. I want them to be pure white.

[Analogy]

LASIK, meh. It’s not that I haven’t heard a lot of good things about it, it’s just… They’re my EYES. My EYES. My motherfarkin’ EYES man! My window to the world. My entire source of income as a television cameraman. I’ve heard stuff about people having problems at night with halos and stuff that I know would bug the crap out of me. So for now I’d rather deal with glasses than have a guy aiming frickin lazer beams at my face.

I’m 20/15 fully corrected, but I haven’t updated the prescription in a while, I’m probably down to 20/25 or so right now.

[Analogy]

The downside of using photoshop to fix your white balance is saturated whites get shifted as well:

The original photo was a bit yellow and I shifted it to look more natural and now the whites look bad. I shot that event JPG thinking, oh, I never do all that much modification to my band photos (WRONG), I’ll just save space on my memory card. In the future I’m just going to shoot RAW and handle white balance issues in my RAW tool.

[Analogy]

How are you backlighting it? If you’re just putting a lamp right behind it, that’s probably your problem. The best way I’ve seen to backlight a bottle is to shoot it in front of a large flat-colored background (white works, but experiment with colors too), aiming all your lights at the background instead of the bottle itself.

It also looks like your bottle’s empty… Try filling it back up with water.

[Analogy]

Firefox, no problems here. I mostly read Fark through the RSS feed though.

[Author]

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