Dream Camera...(revisited)

Back in 2006, I wrote a post which listed all the cameras I've owned  through the years and made a presumptuous conclusion that my days of upgrading were over since I obtained my "Dream Camera", a Canon 1DmkII.  Silly me..
Since then I've had 3 bodies:
Canon 5DmkII - A great image sensor trapped in a slow focusing, mid-grade build quality body.
Canon 5DmkIII - A super image sensor wrapped in a solid body and endowed with the modern AF system of the top of the line 1Dx. An excellent camera that should do more than any photographer short of the sports shooter could ask for.
Canon 1Dx - The top dawg, IQ, high ISO capability and dynamic range that made me choose it, and its premium $$, over the 5D.
My glass collection has also grown to now include: 15mm 2.8 fisheye,14mmF2.8, 24mm 3.5 TS-E II, 17-40F4L,24-105F4LIS,50F1.8, 70-200F2.8LIS II,85F1.2L, 100mmF2.8L Macro, and my baby the 300F2.8L.

So NOW am I done?...hardly. I know better. I can probably say that I'm done with DSLRs at this point as my dream camera now is a one of the new Compact System Cameras. As sensor technology advances, these smaller sensor formats will keep all the advantages of lighter, more compact bodies and lenses without any compromise in image quality. Manufacturers are pretty close to hitting the sweet spot and I'm about to sell my 5DmkIII to move to one of these gems. Leading the pack is the Fuji ex-1 followed by the Sony Nex-6 and with the awesome lenses available for the micro 4/3s systems, those are high on the list as well...

Workflow test: Canon 1Dx

So one of the things I was really looking forward to with my 1Dx was superfast image transfers with it's built in Ethernet port. The 1Dx can be set to connect to a network and upload files to an FTP server either for shooting tethered or for downloading all images after a shoot (which was my interest). I was salivating over the possibility of hooking this up to my gigabit network and sucking a 32Gig shoot down in a few minutes. But as soon as I configured my FTP server and set up the camera to send my first shoot my bubble went bust... a paltry 17MB/sec throughput (slower than my  USB 2.0 reader) Switching to the USB 3.0 port of the camera wasn't much better, averaging just 24MB/sec. So while these interfaces are probably a big improvement for tethered shooting, for larger transfers it looks like the card reader will still reign supreme. Damn shame...

Building a better box for Lightroom...not really

So I finally got tired of putting up with what I thought was an out of date computer system (pre intel 'core i' ) Decided to build a box specifically aimed at speeding up my Lightroom workflow. The latest Ivy Bridge 3770k with 4 hyperthreaded cores overclocked to 4.3Ghz, 32 Gb of ram, 3 SSDs: 1 for the OS, 1 as 'working area' to store the raw files of any shoot actively being worked and 1 SSD dedicated to the Lightroom catalogue database and associated previous. USB3.0 card readers for quick downloading. All running under the control of the svelte Windows 8 operating system.

 This box is fricken hot, but did it do anything for my workflow? Well not really. Improvement was rather disappointing. Importing, and rendering a big shoot is still a  'start and go watch TV' process. Most disappointing is that the image to image load time is still a couple tenths of a second which doesn't sound like much but after shooting a football game at 12 frames a second I want to quickly scan through my shoot to grab the keepers. With this hardware expect (and should get )  INSTANTANEOUS image to image load times. Lightroom is great, but its just a pig so I'm crossing my fingers that they add some GPU acceleration and other speed trick for Lightroom 5.

So I'm calling this new box build a bust for lightroom but as a consolation, I think I'm gonna throw in a NVIDA 660ti and make one rocking gaming box!

3 feet to the right

Went to shoot a local HS football game last night - I love shooting action from the sidelines. Lately, I've been  playing with dialing in the 1Dx and getting use to its controls and setting it up so I can work quickly.
So there I was on the side lines about 35 yards down field from the line of scrimmage. I watch the snap through my 300mm lens and see a big hole develop and running back coming right up the middle, and the defense bites, but it's play action and I see the QB roll out with the ball, lock on target and launch the ball. I pull away from the camera and spot their star receiver hauling ass down the opposite side line, I whip the camera to the action, find him in the view finder, the camera locks focus in an instant. I can see his eyes tracking the ball as it approaches, they widen as ball comes into view, I thought it was out of his reach, he leaps, completely laying out in mid air - this kid was frickin' flying, it was so awesome. I start firing off the shutter but WTF?  I see a zebra flash across my viewfinder! I've been wanting for a shot like this since I've been shooting football and just my luck, that official ate his wheaties that morning and actually kept up with these kids - good for him, but damn if it screwed my shot.

Don't give up on that small sensor just yet.

While everyone is going ga-ga over the latest 'big sensor in a small camera' (including me admittedly) There is still some image related advantages of a small sensor pocket cam - Macro shots are just crazy easy with these guys. Their small sensor means super depth of field, and while not so favorable for portraits of people, it's a plus on macro portraits of little creatures such as my six-eyed friend here. 

I found this guy crawling around our campsite on a recent trip and grabbed this shot with my trusty Canon Powershot G9.  I never used the viewfinder, I just stuck the lens about an inch away from this guy half pressed til I heard the 'beep' and fired - the wide DOF kept him nice and sharp. Lighting was provided by the built-in flash and what's neat is that at these close distances, the lens is closer to the subject than the flash is to the lens so it results in an off-axis light just like off camera flash  but without all the triggers and extra gear. (I actually had to hold the camera upside down so the flash was close enough to light the subject, right side up, it was casting the light about 2 feet behind the subject.)

I think the results (make sure you click the picture to see it full size) weren't too shabby for a camera that cost less than 1/3 the price of good Macro lens for the DSLR. 

Field test: Canon 1Dx -initial thoughts.

My 1Dx first field test

I've been a Canon shooter ever since I went digital 10 years ago. My progression through Canon's DSLR line up has been the D30, 10D, 1DmkII, 5DmkII, 5DmkIII and now the 1Dx. I mainly shoot high school football which, if you don't know, is mainly played at night in about the worst lighting you should ask a camera to shoot action sports in. My typical exposure settings of 1/500 sec @ F2.8 meant my ISO would range between 2500 to 6400 depending on the field and location. For the last couple seasons the 5DmkII was filling this role and even with its low frame rate and antiquated 9 point AF system, I was getting a fair amount of `keepers' it just took a bit more planning and anticipating the play to make sure I was focused on the right subject at the right time. I made the plunge this year with the 1Dx in hopes that is superior low light image quality coupled with real sports oriented AF and frame rate would allow me to be a bit more spontaneous on the sideline and really increase my `keeper' rate.

Ergonomics:
It doesn't get any better than this. Ever since the 1DmkII, I've fallen for the 1D body configuration and I've fitted all my cameras with extended battery grips but they never come close to the comfort of a real 1D body. All controls (and Canon crammed a lot of em in there) fall comfortably under your thumb and finger tips. You can quickly make adjustments to most of the major camera settings without ever taking your eye from the viewfinder. I sorta wish they used a dial for mode selection like on the 5D, I use custom settings quite a bit and I think using the dial to switch between them is much faster than the 1Dx's button press plus scroll - but that's such a small nit pic.

AF:
Most of the internet reviews have commented how immediate the AF is on the 1Dx - I guess it's all relative, compared to my 5DmkII this thing is WORLDS faster but my old 1DmkII with the 300F2.8 lens has been my standard for AF speed and tracking performance and regardless of what the numbers say, I don't feel that the 1Dx is significantly faster than that model is - just than now I can finally enjoy this focusing speed at night - I really is nice to be able to see a pass, find the receiver, point and snap into focus.

Spontaneous shots like this weren't possible with my 5DmkII

What the 1Dx does bring to the table is 4 menu pages of AF parameter settings to tweak. I'm a major geek so I appreciate the ability to tweak things the way I like but I'm sure others may have an opinion similar to my Nikon friend that says `you shouldn't need a 32 page white paper to learn how to use the autofocus of your camera...It should just work'. I can't really argue with that logic.
One interesting mode that is exclusive to the 1Dx (for now) is Canon's Intelligent Tracking and Recognition(iTR) mode that uses data from the 100,000 pixel color metering system to `recognize' the subject and track it across the screen automatically switching between the 61 AF sensors to maintain focus. Wow this sounds really awesome, reading the marketing literature. But, iTR can only be selected when the camera is in Automatic Focal point Selection, a mode that I never use because it rarely focuses on what I want to focus on . Unfortunately I found this to be true here as well, at least for my Football shooting, where there are many objects in view, all wearing similar colors. I'd imagine it'd work pretty well on single subjects, like a tennis player or a car on a track, but then again, I never had issue with the accuracy of the normal AiServo modes for tracking things like this.

Image Quality:
It all comes down to this right? Canon's flagship doesn't disappoint here, I found images to have great color rendition and excellent resolution. Subtle textures are rendered with such great detail that doesn't make me miss the extra megapixels of the 5D. And unlike the files I got from the 5DmkII, which I found to be a bit unexciting and in need a bit of mid tone contrast adjustment and sharpening in post, I am liking these straight out of the camera.
In my initial game day outing I did something I never do, I shot in jpg. I wanted to see how all the camera's bells and whistles worked to produce a finished image. So I set the camera to F2.8@1/500s and let the camera auto adjust ISO for the correct exposure.
I found the camera's auto white balance did an excellent job maintaining sensible colors as lighting changed from daylight to dusk to sodium vapor lighting. The Matrix metering did an admirable job of not blowing out white jerseys against a dark background. The Standard Noise reduction setting however, was a little too heavy handed for my taste, smearing finer textures into an almost cellophane look but otherwise excellent in holding detail in medium and larger textures and eliminating color noise in the shadows. Any noise in the shadows had a film like grain to it which I found pleasing. All in all, I'd judged the jpg quality with NR to be better that what I was able to achieve shooting raw at the same ISO with the 5dmkII and doing NR in post. I think if I bump the NR down a click, I'll be happy shooting jpg and finally just go from shoot to publish without any post processing.

1/500 F2.8 ISO5000

Conclusion:
The 1Dx is an AMAZING camera, I barely touched on a fraction of its feature (nor will I likely use all of them), but $6700? That's $2k more than the 1DmkIV it replaces. I think Canon pushing their prices a bit too far North lately and honestly, if I didn't have a fortune in Canon Lenses, I'd be writing a Nikon review right now.

You may have noticed there was a 5DmkIII in my opening paragraph; I picked that up because I was afraid the 1Dx wouldn't ship before the season started. I seriously thought of cancelling the 1Dx order after shooting the 5DmkIII as all my complaints about the mkII were fixed - better build quality, higher frame rate, a modern AF system. In fact the jury is still out on this one. I'm only keeping one of them so I'll be shooting these side by side this season - I think the 5DmkIII may win out at $3k less.

HTC One S vs. Galaxy Nexus

 I recently 'downgraded' my phone. Yes, you read that right, this early adopting geek dumped HTC's latest hotness for a 6 month old Galaxy Nexus. Why? The butter, baby (I'll explain). 

First off, I've always thought HTC made better phones than Samsung and the One S is more proof of this. It  is a much better phone and clearly beats the Galaxy Nexus in the following areas:

• Camera: More Megapixels, MUCH faster response and the super-slow motion video capture is a fun feature. 
• Faster Processor
• Build Quality - The One S oozes quality. Fit and finish as well as it's sleek design make the Galaxy Nexus look like a hunk of cheap plastic. I personally think the One S of the nicest looking phones out there right now - yes even better that Apple's 4s, but I guess that's not saying much as the Iphone is at the end of it's design cycle. 
• Better Antenna design, Cell, GPS and WiFi performance of the HTC beats the Samsung by a mile in this area - Both WiFi and GPS performance is spotty on this Samsung (and Samsungs I've had in the past) The Samsung routinely drops GPS signal if not placed high up on the dash of my truck whereas the HTC never skipped a beat when placed deep in my center console. 

 So those are some pretty significant pluses for the HTC so why the switch?

• Pure Google: The Nexus Line always has the Vanilla Android OS the way Google intended without any goofy skins place in there by the manufacturers that in the past slowed things down and changed or broke some of the OS's basic functionality. 
• Higher Resolution Screen - While it's not that noticeable to me on the phone, but on the occasion when I hook up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse the extra resolution does a better job of filling a 20" monitor.
• NFC - not that I use this now, but it's something I'm looking forward to seeing what creative new ways devs will incorporate this tech into their apps - and I'll be able to play with it. 
• Interchangeable battery - batteries never last forever - especially in Arizona - so having to send a phone back to the factory to replace a battery in a year is not something I want to deal with. Also, I like having a spare, fully charged battery to swap out in times when a charger isn't near by.  
• Super Hackable - The Nexus line has typically been a developer platform and because of that they are super easy to unlock, root, and load alternate ROMs. And since there is no manufacturer skin to modify or Carrier testing to perform, they are the first inline to get the latest OS releases. In fact, I updated my phone to Jelly Bean using a posted OTA image even before it was put on Google's servers. 
• Super Dev support: Being a development platform, Nexus phones have always had a lot of support from the ROM community which really extends the life of the phone. Heck I think the Nexus One I passed down to by Son had a stable version of ICS on it much faster than any OTA update for much more modern handsets. 

What about the butter? Oh yes - project butter - The bottom line reason I switched to the Galaxy Nexus was to get Google's latest Operating system, Jelly Bean which had extensive modifications to the UI framework. In my opinion, Google hit a home run with this one. The phone and it's UI are so much smoother and more responsive - making it feel faster than the HTC despite the Nexus' slower processor. My HTC would still have an occasional frame jitter during some scrolling activities - I haven't encountered any lapse while on the Galaxy Nexus - it pure butter baby!. 

Jelly Bean is supposed to be just incremental improvements on the major update that came with ICS but in my mind, it's more than that.  UI responsiveness was one of the last areas where IOS was still superior to Android. No matter how big of an Android fanboy you are, you have to admit IOS could always be counted on as providing a silky smooth user experience that wasn't matched by any device running Android. But with Jelly Bean, Google has erased this advantage and has finally delivered a polished, Mature OS...all for free.