Hi!

It’s a weekday and I’m not posting at 07:30 UK time. I feel so naughty. Like I’m breaking some big, fat, juicy rule and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

Anyway, a few things:

1. I’m now posting over at Download Squad. I almost want to say I’m a ‘tech journalist’, but I think that might be too big a title. Tech blogger? Opinionated tech harpy? Re-news master? Either way, I started there a few days ago, and it’s going well!
2. Some of my fine-art photos are reaching double-numbers! As you all know, it’s all about collecting things with low numbers on the back. Also, considering I raise the price every time I sell a photo, you should seriously consider investing now (note how I am slowly developing the ability to whore myself to the public. It seems this is an abilityvital for survival as a Bohemian artist…).
3. There’s a brothel in Berlin, Germany that is offering discounts for cyclists. Yup, the House of Desire in Berlin is claiming to be the very first ‘green’ brothel in the world. ‘Show your helmet at the front desk to claim your discount.’

That is all for now. More photos to come over the weekend and on Monday for week 9 of 52 Weeks!

[This photo contains a lot of pretty photos. Just scroll down if you don't want to read stuff.]

Before your very eyes the format of this blog is shifting. Tuesday will now be, ’til the day I die, the day I forget to charge my camera battery, or the apocalypse, ‘Photogasm Day’ (I reserve the right to change the name at a later date if it no longer suits the image I am trying to project…)

Let me tell you about the new format for Tuesday!

First, I’ll link to the new installment of whatever photography project I’m working on — which is 52 Weeks at the moment.

Then I tell you how my current photographic projects are doing. 52 Weeks is going well! I think Abi and I are both surprised that we are a) actually keeping to the Monday schedule and b) still friends. There have been a few touch-and-go moments when she’s got all diva, but mostly things have been plain-sailing! For next week, I have a great homage to Halloween planned. All I can tell you now is that it’ll involve a large pumpkin and my face. It could go monumentally wrong. Those self-portraits you see at the bottom of the page may turn out to be the last known examples of what my face looked like before the Pumpkin Incident.

Next, to excite and tantalise, I’ll tell you about any upcoming photographic stuff. Which currently… is not much. I’m pushing my boundaries though. Pointing my camera at things I wouldn’t even have glanced at previously. I have promised a few local girls (I know that makes them sound like prostitutes, but they’re not — at least as far as I know) some portrait work. Or at least photos of them. Not necessarily portraiture. And I actually want to get out on the STREETS and take some photos there, the cut and thrust, the back-alleys. I suppose I should go into London to do that, or Brighton. There’s this whoooole area of photography (photojournalism, candid portraiture) just waiting to be… shot…  and I’ve not done much of it at all — and I really should do more of it! You saw some stuff in the summer (the Ray Ban Kid), and a few last week, but other than that… not much. So you might see some pretty-local-girl photos in the coming days and weeks.

Talking of local, I also want to get some more of my photos hanging  in nearby cafes and cinemas, or galleries.

And finally, in each and every Tuesday Photogasm, there will be lots of juicy photos: ones I’ve taken in the past week, or shots I’ve dug up from the archives. Enjoy!

Note: Some of these haven’t made it to Flickr yet. Consider them an ‘exclusive’. Also, in the bird photos, are those crows, or something else?

(This one came out really red for some reason… not sure why. It’s over-exposed I think, and not perfectly-sharp. Not that I’m complaining… it’s cool! The leaves in the top right are almost the right colour, incidentally.)

This last one is the first of my ‘50mm landscapes’ — an entirely new concept for me. Landscapes… but with a telephoto lens. Makes things feel more… compressed? Compact? More detail, less negative space. Incredibly hard to take too… but I think this photo proves that the concept works, so I’ll be taking some more!

And that’s this week’s Photogasm.

Unfortunately I’m going to cite the contents of a long, three-page story in this blog entry. Fortunately, it’s an absolutely awesome story about the curious history, convoluted present and hopeful future of the placebo effect. Even if it takes you a while to read, it’s worth reading — it takes you from the origin of placebos (salt water instead of morphine during World War 2) through to modern day drug trials, where placebos are beating pharmaceutical drugs such as anti-pain meds or anti-depressants.

It’s crazy stuff — really bat-shit crazy. The story doesn’t really go into the why, as we don’t know the answer yet — it’s amazing enough that a group has finally been formed to look into it (pharmaceutical companies, the ones with all the money when it comes to research, obviously want the placebo response to just… go away. ASAP.) – Since the beginning, the placebo has been Big Pharma’s number one enemy. To pass drug trials a new product has to beat out the placebo effect by a significant margin. In the olden days, this was apparently quite easy.

Today… well, the expert that the story focuses on, William Potter, goes as far to say that in during modern-day tests, Prozac is being beaten-out by placebos, and thus would never make it to market, if it had been invented today. The story actually begins with a story about Merck, a big pharmaceutical company: they’re testing a new anti-depressant (MK-869), and they just can’t seem to beat the placebo effect. Both the drug and the placebo effect had an equal success rate! The placebo effect is so strong at the moment that very few drugs are making it through testing and into the greedy, self-medicating hands of the public.

It’s definitely a weird one that needs to be sussed out. It’s sad that it has been ignored for so long because the body’s self-healing functions are the enemy of pharmacology. Pharmacology’s sole purpose is to dominate the central nervous system, not to aid or assist it in its curative powers. What has caused the increased placebo response? Now this is the funny bit: in realising that placebo response is different, depending on where you are in the world, Big Pharma is actually going to other countries where the placebo effect is weaker, to get their drugs approved.

It would seem that the placebo response is based on culture, society. It’s long been known that we have more faith in the trustworthy, the responsible, the professional. If I tell you I’m going to fix your computer, you’re relieved and walk away happy. If I tell you I’m going to remove your tooth, you’re going to adversely react, scream, run away — and rightfully so!

The story seems to surmise that it’s the pharmaceutical’s massive marketing campaigns that have pushed up the power of the placebo. We’re surrounded by so many reports and surveys and commercials that tell us of the efficacy of anti-depressants that we will them to work: if it works for him, it will work for me — of course, the funny bit is that most drugs have side-effects, and the placebo does not… so with placebo tests we’re told that we’re taking Prozac, our body expects it to work… and so it works. Without any of the side-effects.

And it turns out that doctors have long been prescribing placebos to patients! This one might shock you a little. If you’re on anti-depressants right now… you might actually not be on them. Doctors have long known the power of confidence and good bed-side manner. Doctors often prescribe under-powered doses to patients and tell them that it will work. And, unsurprisingly, it works — with all the potency of actual, drug-based medication. Awesome.

We can walk away from this story with two great things under our belt: a) we’ll be seeing more research into the placebo effect and the body’s self-healing powers. We’re not talking about the body’s ability to fix physical damage, but when it comes to biological imbalance, brain chemistry and ‘rewiring’, we’re capable of a lot more than we think — and b) don’t stop believing in medication. It is your belief in the power of anti-depressants that make them work, not the chemical compound itself.

If that’s not food for thought… I don’t know what is.

It is with a heavy heart that I bring you such ill news: Wednesday blog entries have now begun their solemn, shuffling gait towards the Great Blog Graveyard in the Sky.

That brings us down to just Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, with occasional posts on Friday and Saturday (but Dollhouse was axed, so I’ll have to find some other pretty girl to canvas the pages of my blog with…)

But all is not lost. This gives me more time to spend on photography and the preparation of travel plans. I have some big, longer-than-a-month-abroad ideas that I need to put serious effort into. It also gives me a little time to work on non-bloggy writing like short stories and novels. I’ve been looking at writing a novel for a while now, but with my commitments both here and over on Download Squad, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day or strength in my fingers.

Thing is… I’ve written a lot this year. It was actually my New Year’s resolution, to write every day. Originally that was ‘a blog post every day’, but obviously with commitments and jobs ever-changing, I’ve had to spread the love a little.

Did you know that I’ve written 422 blog entries this year? At an average of 800 words per entry, that’s 337,600 words. In the last 6 weeks I’ve written 40,000 words at Download Squad.

Throw in a few thousand email, comments on other blogs and forum discussions… and I think I’ve written over 500,000 words this year. Maybe more. That’s five big novels or ten crappy female novellas.

No wonder my fingers ache…

So this is me retiring Wednesday from my blogging schedule. I’ve intended to for a while — the plan was always to have a big blog post on Monday followed by photos, news commentary or random bits of wacky stuff throughout the week.

And hey, instead of writing, I’ve spent today updating the various indexes on the site. If you’re new here, it’s well worth giving the Index of Topics a look-see, or my collected Travel Stories if you prefer thrilling tales of excitement, woe and adventure. The sidebar has also been updated, which is your quick index to all things juicy. Oh, I’ve also got a bonus photo for you, because it’s now December, the festive season of giving and sharing and all that stuff.

Last week I said that if no one else wrote a review, I would — and as it turns out, there’s still just a bunch of previews but nothing substantive. Yes, it has 1080p HD video recording capabilities, yes it has a shiny-almost-Canon-7D-18-megapixel sensor… but no one’s commented on what it feels like. Specs are only a tiny portion of the story — so here’s a hands-on review of the new Canon 550D.

Note: Don’t expect a highly-technical review. No doubt professional sites like DPReview will get to that in due course. This is all subjective. There are no chromatic aberration graphs, or side-by-side comparisons. Just some test shots, some video, and my (fairly) expert opinion. I’ve also never done this before, so the format might be a bit weird. Stick with me though, I should cover most of the important stuff!

You can skip directly to the sample photos, if you want to see some evidence of the new CMOS sensor and metering system, or the gains in high-ISO performance.

Gear Used

Camera: Canon 550D (also known as the Digital Rebel T2i in America, or the Kiss X4 Digital in Japan). Costs about £700, body-only, or £800 with the kit lens. Due to imports/exchange rates, it’s a lot cheaper to buy in the US (about $800 for the body only).

Lenses: Sigma 50mm f1.4 (around £400), and the Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 (also around £400). I’m actually a bit of a prime lens snob, but I’m still waiting for an APS-C sensor 10mm prime lens… you hear me, Canon, Sigma? Anyway, both lenses are best-in-class… as long as you get a good sample (I’m not going to go into the variety of Sigma’s output here…)

Initial Impressions

Before the 550D, I used a 450D for my ‘every day’ and on-the-move photography (travel, mostly). The 550D is identical to the 450D — weight, shape, balance, etc. The body seems to have a slightly different finish, and the grip is a little ‘grippier’. In more detail:

(500D on the left, 550D on the right)

The trigger: The button itself is a little harder to depress; slightly more ‘clicky’. Not ‘hard’ to operate though, just a little more… affirmative.

The buttons in general: No doubt the change to the trigger is due to an overhaul of all the buttons on the camera. The buttons on the back of the camera are now flat, making them quite a lot easier to use (though they take some getting used to!) There’s also a new ‘record’ button up by the eyepiece, to go with the camera’s video capabilities. Personally I still have a few issues hitting the depth-of-field-test button, but I think that’s due to my huge hands.

Other bits: In all other ways, it’s identical to the 450D (and 500D, I believe). There’s a new HDMI output, below the USB output, and an audio input (mic) above — and also a microphone on the front; for the video capabilities. Oh, it uses a new kind of battery too, the LP-E8 — so you’ll need new batteries, and a new grip too (lame!)

Photos

[Sample images are at the end]

The most important bit! (Unless you’re buying it for the 1080p HD video thing, anyway — that’s a bit further down the page). Does the 550D take good photos? ‘Hell yes’ would be the easy answer, but let me break it down a bit.

Resolution: Yup, more megapixels — up to 18 million effective pixels now, or 5134 x 3456. The RAW files are about 25MB, so you might need to get a new memory card!

Image quality (IQ): Better than the 450D, but I can’t compare it to the ‘identical’ sensor of the 7D. There are reports of it producing very, very similar photos to the 7D, despite Canon saying that the sensor is ‘not the same’. Of course you don’t get the weather sealing, but at half the price and half the weight… who am I to complain. The 550D uses ‘gapless micro lenses’ infront of the CMOS sensor, increasing the quality and sensitivity of every pixel. This in turn opens up ‘extended ultra-high ISO’ settings (more on that in a second).

Shooting: Continuous frames-per-second seems about the same as the 450D, despite the new DIGIC 4 processor — the listed speed is 3.7FPS, but if you shoot in RAW-only mode it will reach 6FPS! There’s all the standard options — RAW, JPEG, RAW + JPEG, etc. — but there’s currently no RAW support for Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop. The Canon Digital Photo Professional RAW processing tools are OK, but lack the depth of Adobe’s Camera RAW.

Metering, auto focus, and exposure compensation & bracketing: While we still only get the 9-point auto-focus (damnit!), there is a new ‘iCFL’ metering system in use, inherited from the Canon 7D. Basically, each of the 9 focus points collect a lot more information that’s then used to more-accurately expose your photos. From my tests, it does seem to be better and more reliable  than the 450D — but it’s pretty hard to test empirically. The AEB (exposure compensation/bracketing) now lets you go from -5 to +5, in steps of 1/2 or 1/3 — pretty neat, if you shoot into bright lights a lot (stage/theatre photography, in my case).

Custom functions: Some of the juicy high-end custom functions make their Rebel debut:  ’ISO expansion’ and ‘noise reduction’. With more pixels rammed every closer together, noise increases and image quality generally degrades — enter TECHNOLOGY! How better to counter technology issues with yet more technology? First, there’s ‘ISO expansion’ that lets you shoot at up to 12800 ISO speed, i.e. almost complete darkness with a large-aperture prime. There’s also on-camera noise reduction that seems to perform a lot better than the on-computer equivalent — you can enable noise reduction for all high-ISO shots, or just for long exposures. If you’ve used a digital camera in the dark, you’ve probably noticed the noise that creeps in — these new functions go a long way to making digital cameras better for night-time photography.

THE DAMN SHUTTER: The shutter is still loud enough to scare children from 100 meters. It’s a bit quieter than the 450D but not by much. Why does Canon give us such a noisy mirror mechanism when they’re capable of so much better? Lame.

Video

No doubt you’ve heard about the Canon 550D’s video capabilities. It was only a matter of time before the functionality dripped down from the 5D, to the 7D, and ultimately the 550D — you can now get a full-HD 1080p digital camera for just £700… crazy! And it’s pretty damn good at it too. Check out this little video clip:

Excuse the bed hair, but still — did you try it at 1080p? Full screen? (If your computer will even render it…) Anyway, the video functionality, in more detail:

HD, 1080p, 720p, etc: You can shoot video in all sorts of ways, with the 550D. Canon have learnt their mistake from the earlier video-shooting SLRs and given the 550D a full array of options: 1080p at 24/25fps (NTSC/PAL), 720p at 50/60FPS, and even a ‘digital zoom’ 640×480 resolution (which is kinda fun). Video clips are capped at 29 minutes and 59 seconds, which is 4GB at full 1080p.

Video quality (VQ?): I’m nothing more than an avid, amateur film maker, but the reaction of those that have seen my test 550D videos have been universally great. It’s simply flawless, 1920 x 1080 video. Just like usual film-making, the lens matters a lot. I’m not sure how else I can rate the video quality… it does exactly what it says on the box; that’s it.

Audio quality: The 550D has a forward-facing monaural microphone. It’s surprisingly good, though I haven’t tried it ‘at a distance’ — I can’t imagine it’s particularly directional. You can also hear a lot of noise from the wind in one my other videos. It was really, really windy though. Anyway, it’s more than enough for indoors and self-documenting work. There’s also an input for an external microphone (3.5mm jack).

Other bits: Video recording on an SLR is definitely a two-person thing. There’s no auto-focus, you see — well, there is, before you start shooting, but not once you press ‘record’. So you need a tripod, and depending on how bright it is, you might be trying to stay in a very shallow focus plane (look at my other test video to see how shallow the f1.4 focus is!) By default video recording is in ‘full auto’ mode, which basically chooses the ISO/aperture to match your framerate (24, 25, 50 or 60 FPS). You can switch it to ‘manual’, if you need to force a particularly wide/shallow depth of field.

Everything Else (appendix)

There are a few things that don’t really impact your use of the camera but are still worth noting, if only for a sake of completeness.

There’s a new LCD screen: It’s very nice, with lots of pixels and less glare than the 450 or 500D. It’s also the first 3:2 screen — i.e. wide-screen — so your images aren’t shrunk-to-fit any more! The new LCD screen is a real joy.

The digital menus have been enhanced: You can now access more ‘buttons’ through software — hit the new ‘Q’ button and you can change things via the LCD screen. Overall the menus are unchanged (though very busy, with all of the new video recording options), but with the new screen there’s some more real estate that is well-utilized.

Embed copyright info into your images: One of the smaller features to find its way from the higher-end Canon cameras is the ability to add your name and a custom copyright notification/message to every image your camera produces. It’s stored in the EXIF data for each image. Pretty neat!

Sample Images

I’ve only had the camera for a few days, so I haven’t had a chance to try every kind of condition yet. I’ll try to add more to this little gallery over the next few days and weeks. The various improvements to the sensor and the addition of some custom functions to the 550D are generally tailored towards more extreme use — low-light, especially. There’s also ‘Highlight Tone Priority’ (another custom function), but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet — 7D users are reporting great results though, especially for candid/external portrait photography (weddings), so the 550D is probably just as good in that regard.

These photos are all taken on either the Sigma 50mm f1.4, or 10-20mm f4-5.6 lenses, and are straight out of the camera. Click for larger versions.

(Simulated fire, 50mm @ f/1.4, ISO-6400. Close up on the right)

Wide-angle night-time, City of London (The Royal Exchange), 12mm @ f/5, ISO-1600.

Just standard overcast light, 50mm, ISO-100, large aperture. Metering looking good.

Photo on the left looks a bit bright (but it’s accurate). Metering on the right looks pretty spot on, with dark/bright elements!

* * *
If you have any questions about the camera, feel free to leave a comment — I’ll reply.