… or how I almost got stuck in a bog.

Yesterday, my photographic spider senses were tingling. I looked out my window (which overlooks a lovely 2-acre sculpted garden) and thought to myself ‘my, we might be in for a frosty sunset.’ Now, I got the sunset bit wrong, as the cloud cover was simply too heavy, but I did capture a little frosty moment above the lovely little Ashdown Forest in Sussex.

It’s a great photo, but I thought I could do better! So, heading down the hill you see in that photo, I stumbled across a lovely wide, open, frosty scrub land.

This photo isn’t quite so good (it’s just not as interesting), but I do like how it feels almost… Siberian. I forced the colours to come out very cold, and washed out. Dismal, I guess you could say. English and grey.

So, having taken that photo, I thought ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I could compose a photo with that tree in the foreground, and the hill falling away below me, with the town’s lights in the background…’, and started trudging down the hill. I guess those of you from more interesting climates might be more used to bogs, quagmires and swamps, but here in England they’re certainly not common. I was a little surprising then when my foot sunk about 30cm into brown, sticky (and smelly)… bog. Not deterred, and avidly chasing THE killer photo, like all real photographers should, I strapped the camera around my neck and trekked on, using my tripod to test the ground in front of me, like a REAL explorer.

About half way to the tree, with no sign of the bog drying out, and realising I’d left my mobile phone at home, I decided to abort and scramble to safety. Yes, I wussed out without taking the photo… but to be fair, I didn’t think my tripod would balance very well in the middle of some mire. Better to escape with my life, and an unboggified camera.

Anyway, I’ve been looking at two new ultra-wideangle lenses to replace my venerable, awesome but-not-quite-wide-enough Canon 17-40L. I don’t shoot on full-frame-sensor bodies unless I’m in a studio, so the 17mm on my Canon 450D comes out at a not-so-wide 26mm. Both Sigma and Canon provide some awesome ’small sensor only’ (APS-C, for the geeks out there) lenses: Canon 10-22mm & Sigma 10-20mm. Both seem virtually identical in reviews, some even placing the Sigma above the costly Canon in terms of sharpness and chromatic abberation. Now I’m just waiting for a good deal to pop up on Ebay, or for one to appear at one of my local camera shops, and then I’ll wow you with some English landscapes!

It’s rediculously cold here in England. It’s so cold that they’re calling it ‘global cooling‘. Some parts of Britain are predicted to hit -10C! WHAT THE HELL? We have ground frost and snow here that hasn’t melted in 5 days now.  That means it hasn’t been above 1 or 2C in … 5 days! If it continues, we’ll be having the coldest winter since 1740. Brrr.

The other day, when I fell into that bog, I actually thought I might get frostbite and have to amputate before gangrene spread up my legs to my more important organ. Er, organs. To top it off, I have no heating in my bedroom (it’s an old house, and daddy just told me to ‘grow a pair’ back when I told him I was waking up, unable to find my penis (the irony was lost in the ‘growing a pair’, I guess)– so I promptly started wearing thermal underwear…), so I sit here in big furry slippers, a wooly jumper, and fingerless gloves. ‘Classy hobo chique’ I like to call it.

This is where I should probably rant about global warming, and how it doesn’t seem to be an issue, but I think it’s probably better if people draw their own conclusions on the matter. It’s just so abhorrently boring having one-sided arguments hammered into us by the media.

I’m trying to remember where I heard it (I think it was during Frost/Nixon, which I watched last night, and was very well realised and acted!), but there’s some phrase that goes like: There’s a difference between a democracy where everyone can be heard, and a democracy where everyone just gets a vote. Actually, I think it was in the book I’m reading (Nation still), but who cares. I’m not even sure of what my point is; I think it’s that no matter your level of education, or wisdom, or aptitude, everyone has a vote. Long gone are the times where people were really heard. Or perhaps people were granted more merit, given their education or repute. I guess that’s more a problem of a burgeoning population though… The best we could hope for is a population that is educated enough to vote correctly.  People should be educated enough to research and reach their own conclusions, with important matters at least.

Anyway, I caved and bought the Sigma 10-20mm. I figured the 17-40 covers the end of the range nicely, so really I am just paying £300 for the extra 7mm on the wide end. Not a bad price to pay, really. Amazon have a fantastic deal on it, if you’re also in the market for an ultra-wide-angle lens: Sigma 10-20mm.

While we’re on the topic of technology (OK, tenuous at best), I’ll leave you with Apple’s new revolutionary innovation.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I woke up this morning to quite a fantastic phenomenon — frozen morning mist. There might be a scientific name for such a form of precipitation (and if anyone knows, please let me know), but all I know is that it’s damn pretty. I guess it occurs when the temperature dips just before sunrise, freezing any of the moisture in the air, affixing it to everything. As a result, you get a lovely, crystalline sharpness to everything. It’s not quite the same as snow-covered mornings, as they are just a small, thin layer of ice crystals: so you can see the colours beneath the frost!

Of course the best way to illustrate this would be with a photo.

Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but as luck would have it (kind of), I was woken up by some reckless beast throwing a box from Amazon right onto my crotch, as I was sleeping. An interesting way to wake up, throbbing, not certain if you’ve just had a particularly… wild dream, or if some bastard’s just thrown a big box onto your nuts. Anyway, bruising and hampered fertility aside, it was the new Sigma lens! Hooray!

Muttering expletives and quickly squeezing my ass into some pants, I went out to take a photo:
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As you can see, it’s quite a sparkly, special look! It looks even better large, as you can make out all the detail on the end of the branches, and all the little specks of colour. I’ll try to get some more photos with the new lens, for my benefit and yours. Maybe strap a polariser on and go wild with a sunset.

Anyway, I activated a neat new feature on this blog! If you double click any word on the page, you’ll get a cute little pop-up that defines the word for you. I don’t think it works with phrases, and it doesn’t work with links. It’ll probably tell you that I’m not spelling things correctly too, because the software is Americanz-English. Let me know if it doesn’t work, or if you have some kind of weird OCD-like condition where you always double click everything on the page as you read it (probably the same kind of person that highlights random blocks of text as they’re reading… you know who you are).

I also changed how images display on the site (just a little), but it’s still not complete. The slide show option is completely atrocious (really, don’t click it). I’m also working on a little shopping attachment to sell Seb-related apparel. Okay, that sounded a little too narcissistic, what I really meant was prints of my photos. And maybe 1 or 2 t-shirts with ‘Seb Was Here’ and an arrow pointing downwards. For the ladies.

Tomorrow I’m going to write about how I roleplayed a female in World of Warcraft for the first 2 months that I played. Yep, I even got gifts. It was an experiment on the back of my computer games degree course.

… but meanwhile, while the lazy bloggers are wrapped up in bed, most likely nursing a hangover, Sebastian is scarpering around outdoors and driving to the tops of nearby hills to take photos of the snow we had today. Following on from my little ‘Global Cooling’ rant, it seems we’re now due a massive snowstorm — with up to 15cm of snow in some places! FIFTEEN CENTIMETERS! Madness. The picture I took last year, in April, was only about 5 or 6cm, and I thought that was a lot.

Anyway, I’ve been a busy-bee this week — I photographed a show — Stepping Out — which was fantastically lit by friend Gabriel. It’s not the most exciting show in the world (Can you say ‘it only has one location’?), but the lighting can really make or break a show. As a photographer, the lighting is almost the only thing I am interested in, assuming the actors actually know how to act.

(Some more can be found in the ‘People‘ album)

I actually found it quite hard to work with the Sigma 10-20mm when I was taking the Stepping Out photos. It has such a vast field of view that it really is hard to make the entire frame interesting. Not to mention that you need a LOT of ambient light to make it work indoors — it’s very rare for an entire room/stage to be well-lit, and so you end up having to under-expose heavily, or the few well-lit elements are way over-exposed — the photos tended to come out quite dreary and low-contrast. I guess it really is an outdoor landscape lens!

I also took a bunch of photos today, a few of which you can find in the Sussex album, and I took a rather fun self-portrait when we had yet another power cut. Really, you’d think that living in England would entitle me to Western World benefits, like stable electricity… but alas. But it’s not all bad to be forced away from my computers occasionally; a lot of things have been invented or discovered when necessity strikes, or people are taken away from their comfort zone. I doubt we’d have harnessed electricity quite so quickly and efficiently if the Americans hadn’t required a ‘good’ way to execute people at the time.

Anyway, I digress. Today was meant to be a post of photos, as people probably don’t want to focus on anything too meaty on a Sunday. So here’s a lovely captioned image, quite accurately portraying the current success and affluence of black people (and almost-black people):

(You could click it for a full-size version, if you can’t make out the writing…)

I’m working feverishly on my Pakistani accent, but I’m really concerned it might be slightly offensive to anyone of somewhat Eastern origin; and it might also just be plain offensive on the ears of everyone else. I may just wimp-out and do some Russian/Slavic thing. They’re so incredibly misogynistic there that  it was quite awesome (and awful) to observe male/female interactions while I was there. They have the whole patriarchial thing going on in the household too. It wasn’t always overt domination, but there was always those little, questioning looks from the woman to the man, to see if he approved, or if he was about to blow his top.

But man, their women were beautiful…

Oh, and I caught a fox in my garden this morning — are its eyes shut?!

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!

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