My Digital Rebel XT

Stevens Creek trail and Wishman Slough

2006-07-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

I started biking a month back, primarily because I want to bike to work. Having an entrance to the Stevens Creek trail next to my home worked out well for this. Yesterday, I took the dirt road on the east side of the Stevens creek, and continued biking till the end, and I reached Whisman Slogh. This is the area where the Salt Ponds meet the Bay salt-water. The trail was closed to public beyond that. But the view from there was breathtaking. There were lots of migratory birds, pelicans and egrates, basking in the afternoon sun. I wished I had my camera with me. Will take it with me next time and post some photos.

I'm a Dad!!

2006-04-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

Almost four weeks back, we were blessed with arrival of our son.

Here is a snap of him at couple of weeks. Isn't he adorable??

It's a complete different feeling being a Dad!!

Photographing Newborns/Babies

2006-01-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to learn tips and tricks and technicals on shooting newborns and babies. For the time being, I'll just insert couple of links. Will add what I learnt later.
Link to Kodak's site
Digital Grin Newborn Thread

The main tips that I learnt from several mail threads are:

Lighting:

Try to use natural light as much as possible. Best option here is to take the newborn close to the window and take snaps.
Carry a flash with you, and use a bounce flash. It's absolutely not a good idea to use the flash directly on the face of a newborn.
In the hospital lighting, newborns generate lot of IR, and you need a good IR filter (either inbuilt or external).

Composing

Get on to the level of baby, instead of shooting standing up, and making them look like dwarves.
Close-up's generally always work well with babies. But try to include other people also in some snaps.

Equipment

Flash
Wide Angle (especially for small setup for the birthing room) lens.
Fast Lens (for low light).
Zoom lens (If you want to take photos of the baby lying far away inside the nursery)
Filters

Polarizer (to cut reflections on nursery glass, if necessary)
IR filter (may not be necessary)

Conservatory of Flowers, San Francisco Golden Gate Park

2005-12-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

We went to Golden Gate Park on Saturday. After a few days of relentless drizzling, the weather was pretty good. But the cold outside drove us into the Conservatory of flowers . It had five sections inside: Lowland Tropics at the center, Highland tropics and Aquatic plants on the right, Potted plants and Special Exhibits (Orchids at this point of time) on the left.

It'd cost you five bucks to enter, but it was well worth it. Specially the aquatic plants section and the orchids section took our breath away. You can take a look at the Gallery. Some samples are here.

I'd strongly encourage you to visit this place.

Canon 430ex flash

2005-11-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

I was looking at flashes as the inbuilt flash on 350d is not powerful enough and is only okay in fill flash cases. 580ex was too expensive+heavy+overkill for me. So, I was looking at 420EX seriously, but was wondering if E-TTL-II is a good feature to have (which 420ex doesn't have and 580ex does have). Lo and Behold, canon releases 430ex with E-TTLII.

Features and all look nice. It has an LCD screen. A little bit pricey, but I think I'll go with it. Looking forward to finding good deals on this. More information on this flash is available HERE

Cormorants over the bay

2005-11-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

On our company group golf outing (yes, such things do exist even today), I caught these bunch of cormorants flying over the bay:

Sony Camcorder (and some more canon/fuji/nikon/minolta digicam and camcorder) blank screen issue

2005-10-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

UPDATE2: Just got my Camcorder back. Sony was very quick in repairing and returning (about a week of round-trip). Things look okay now. Will do more testing later. (11/18/05)

UPDATE1: Apparently, Sony supplies CCDs for other companies also, and they are facing similar issues. DPReview covers it HERE. (10/28/05)
Off topic from RebelXT, but worth mentionaing. I had a Sony TRV19 camcorder. After about one-and-half years, in the recording mode, it started giving blank screens. On researching the web, I realized it's not a problem only with my camcorder but a significant number of trv19, trv22 and trv33 camcorders. People were talking about class action lawsuits against sony also.

Now the good news. Sony has agreed to fix the problem at no charge and free shipping. Use this LINK TO SONY'S SITE to start the process if you are affected by this.

From Sony's site:

It has recently come to our attention that a limited number of products, manufactured prior to March 2004, that incorporate a certain type of image sensor device (CCD) may exhibit the following:

When the product is used in camera mode, the LCD panel and/or electronic viewfinder exhibits either a distorted image or no image at all.

We have determined that this only occurs in a limited number of devices, but may be accelerated if they are exposed to hot and humid environments.

From October 3, 2005 through October 2, 2007, Sony will repair, free of charge, affected products exhibiting the above-mentioned problem where it is caused by the image sensor device. Sony will also cover the cost of shipping and handling to service to correct this issue.

Please contact the Sony Customer Information Services Center for further assistance at 1-866-703-7669.

New Rebel XT firmware (1.0.3)

2005-10-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Canon has released new Rebel XT firmware. The improvements are:

1. Fixes the phenomenon of shots being unable to be taken when using the remote controller RC-1.
2. Fixes the phenomenon of auto play not stopping during playback.
3. Improves communication reliability when using some CF cards.

Doesn't seem like a major update. I have updated my bookmarks with the new firmware link.

Durga Puja 2005 at Sunnyvale Temple

2005-10-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

Went to Durga Puja at Sunnyvale Temple last weekend. The idol was exquisite. Here is a shot (Click on the photo for a gallery):

Polarizer and RAW mode

2005-09-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

Recently there was a question :
"Would it make a difference using a polarizing filter if I shoot in RAW mode?"

My Answer was

Yes, it would make a difference.

These are two completely different areas. The filters that you put in front
of the camera modifies how the camera sees the external world. The
processing setting inside the camera modifies how YOU see what the camera
has seen. By going to RAW mode, you are asking the camera to be dumb and not
try to use it's intelligence to make the picture look good in your eyes
(because you think you can do a better job using s/w tools). It has got
nothing to do with using polarizer.

For example, using a circular polarizer, you can cut down reflections while
shooting through a glass. If you do not use a circular polarizer, it will be
very difficult, if not impossible, to remove the reflections on the glass.

Exposure and ISO

2005-07-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Steve on the 350d mailing list asked me "When/why would you change the ISO No.?" I thought the answer I gave him will be useful for more people, so putting it here:

ISO number is the third dimention in controlling exposure (first two being aperture and shutter speed). Consider the scenario:
1. You want a loooooooong depth of field since you are shooting a lush green field. So, you have set your aperture to, say f22. With f22 (which is a very small aperture), you have very little light entering the camera. So, you have t have a loooong shutter speed. BUT!!!! you realize you have forgotten your tripod at the hotel. So, there is no way you can hand-hold the camera at that slow a shutter speed and avoid camera shake. So, you nudge up your iso to , say 1600, which will allow you to have faster shutter speed at the same aperture level while keeping the same exposure.

2. You want a very short depth of field (and a larger aperture), WHILE keeping a slower shutter speed (to get the sense of motion, maybe?). However, there is a lot of light and you run the risk of over-exposing your photo. So, you nudge the ISO sensitivity lower, so that you can use slower shutter speed as well as larger aperture.

If you look at those charts (ev charts, in my post HERE ) , they are for ISO 100 speed. You'll have to chuck them down onfe fstop for each ISO level increase.

Also, remember, whith low light, if you use really high ISO settings (say 1600), you have a chance of getting high noise in the picture. So, I'd recommend using upto ISO800 for critical shots.

Hope it helps someone!!

Boot & Man

2005-07-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

This was shot at San Francisco

Yosemite Trip and Photo disaster

2005-07-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

The reason for my not posting anything for a long time is the disaster in the name of photography I had at Yosemite. Considering I can hold the camera steadily, I went for a fery low aperture (f32) for most of the landscape photos in Av mode. That translated into a very slow shutter speed, which went against the rule of 1/focal length. Result is a bunch of blurry images. I should've cranked up the ISO to 1600 or 3200 to have reasonable shutter speeds in these cases.

Some of the photos came reasonably well though. Especially the following shots:

	While driving through Glacier Point Road, we came across this small secluded meadow, which was absolutely green, and full of colorful wildflowers. The bees were having a pretty good time.
This was shot next to the valley loop road.
	View of Nevada Falls (Upper one) and Vernal Falls (Lower one) from Glacier Point
View of Nevada Falls from Glacier Point

Rebel XT and Dust on Sensor

2005-07-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

Dust on sensor can produce spots on your photographs, especially if it's shot with a high DOF (high f-stop value/smaller aparture). They generally become visible in one-color section of photos (like the blue sky). There was a nice explanation why we don't see this problem on film cameras, and why it is Digital SLR specific problem:

It is something that just comes with photography when you change lenses.
In the old days we send the film with dust particles and all to the
development centre. When you loaded a new film in the cam the new film
started to collect dust all over again.

These days we don't replace film anymore, so the sensor accumulates the dust
over time.

Although I haven't had this problem, I'm anticipating it soon. More so since I change lenses more often, and shoot at outdoors more often. Recently there has been a discussion going on the 350d yahoo groups and someone suggested the following steps to clean a sensor. There are suggestions for this all over the web, but this is a first hand account of sensor cleaning:

1. took a test shot for reference, so that you can see if your cleaning action moved, added or removed contamination
2. used the Giotto Rocket blower to clean the mirror box and sensor
3. took a test shot, compared to 1, noticed that amount of dust particles wast decreased but some remained
4. used the sensorbrush
5. took test shot, compared to 3, noticed that amount of dust particles wast decreased but some remained
6. repeated 4 and 5 until no further improvement was possible with the brush. Some 'welded' spots remained
7. used sensorclean (the fluid cleaner)
8. took test shot, compared to last test shot and noticed that most dust is gone except for a few die-hard minor spots.

Shooting Moon

2005-07-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

On the last Full Moon day, I tried my hands on shooting the Moon. Having no access to expensive Astro-photography equipment, I just mounted my Rebel XT with the canon 75-300mm USM on my Hakuba S4500 tripod. I first used the camera to meter the moon, and then scaled it down about 2 f-stops. The moon was still way over-exposed:

Then I started playing around with the aperture and shutter speeds and got some more reasonably decent shots. Check them out in my moon album.

They are not absolutely perfect. But then, I didn't have a L series lens at my disposal. Things learnt:
Good thing:
1. I used a tripod, and used the timer instead of pressing the shutter myself. That saved some camera shake in such long exposures.
Things I missed:
1. Unforgivable. I forgot to set the RAW mode and was shooting JPEG.
2. I should have used MLU (Mirror Lock Up).
While discussing this, someone pointed me to a neat tool named Registax. Check it out. Potentially you can take more than one shots and stack them up to increase sharpness!! Will have to try it sometime.
This is the e-mail I got from Steve Sprengel:

Besides MLU and a more steady tripod configuration, try a little faster
shutter speed, higher f-stop, and STACK 10+ images using Registax so
you'll be able to sharpen things up quite a bit after reducing the noise
via stacking:

http://www.pbase.com/ssprengel/image/39049737

The maximum number of images in the stack will be limited to about two
minutes worth, before the moon has rotated too much for the features to
be aligned between the beginning and the end frames of the sequence.

Keep in mind that the noise is reduced by the squareroot of the number
of images, so to reduce the noise by half you'll have to stack four
images, to reduce it by one fourth you'll have to stack 16.

The other thing to understand that when stacking images of a relatively
large object like the moon, the features will shift with respect to
each other due to atmospheric distortions, so a winter night moon high
in the sky will be much better than a summer night moon low in the sky.

Some interesting info on shooting moon HERE

EV (Exposure Value)/ LV (Light value) Table

2005-06-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

Stealing it from my own website. I have printed it out on a small card and carry it in my wallet. Very Very Handy!!!

EV (Exposure value) table

	*f 1.4*	*f 2.0*	*f 2.8*	*f 4.0*	*f 5.6*	*f 8.0*	*f 11*	*f 16*	*f 22*	*f 32*
1 s	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1/2 s	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11
1/4 s	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1/8 s	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
1/15 s	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
1/30 s	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
1/60 s	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
1/125 s	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
1/250 s	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18
1/500 s	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
1/1000 s	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

LV (Light Value) table

	LV/EV Table for ISO 100
EV	Type of Scene (Brightness)
1	Very Dark, Not Practical except for Timed Exposures
2	Very Dim, Total Lunar Eclipse, Moon Lit Scenes
3 - 4	Dim Indoor Lighting, Candle Light, Street Lights on Wet Streets
5 - 6	Brightly lit indoors, Amusement parks at Night
7 - 8	Well lit Professional Sporting Events at Night
9 - 10	Just after Sunset or Just before Sunrise.
11 - 12	Dark Overcast Daylight Scenes, Total Solar Eclipse
13	Cloud Covered Daylight Scenes
14	Average Daylight, Normal Side Lit Subjects, Partly Cloudy
15	Bright Daylight, Front Lit, Light colored Subjects
16	Bright Daylight reflecting off Snow or Water
17 - 20	Too Bright to be Very Practical
ISO Speed Stops: 12, 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800.
Each stop increases EV by 1 for same LV.

These two tables, in my opinion, are the best friends of a beginner photographer who is meddling with SLR settings. The rule of thumb of shooting using these tables for beginner photographers is to follow these steps:

Look around, find the lighting conditions that matches closely to one of the rows in LV (Light Value) table. [Skip this step if you have a light meter]
Choose the corresponding Light value (say L). You can get the LV directly if you have a light meter.
Calculate the EV from LV based on your Film's (Digital camera's setting's) ISO Speed. LV is same as EV for ISO 100 speed film. For each upstep/downstep in film speed, EV goes up or down respectively by 1. So, for film speed 200, EV will be L+1. Sounds complicated? I'll add a table for this soon.
Refer to the EV table and choose one of the Shutter speed/f-stop (aperture) combination that matches your calculated EV. Based on the scenario you are shooting, you might go for higher/lower shutter speed and adjust f-stop to match.

ER-D120 battery arrived

2005-06-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

Just received the ER-D120 battery. Buy.com is selling it for 18.99, which is the cheapest. For some time, I was undecided between should I buy a Canon branded second battery (NB2LH, costs north of 50$) or a generic battery (sells for couple of bucks on EBay). The thing I least wanted was to have my 1000$ equipment get ruined because I wanted to save a few bucks. Then I decided on the middle ground... to have a non-Canon battery, but go with a name brand like Energizer.
This ERD120 is however has less mAH rating, 580 mAh to be accurate, compared to Canon's NB2LH (720mAh). So, it will probably not last longer (I'm expecting around 150-200 shots). But then this is just a backup battery.
I'll pop this guy in and see how it goes in the evening.
I have a trip to Yosemite coming on 8th. Hope to get ample opportunity to use the RebelXT there.

Update: I'm pretty happy with the ER-D120 battery. Would recommend it over much more expensive canon brand (unless you want to risk using the one doller batteries from ebay).Check some of the ads to the right to find a better value on Energizer ER-D120 and you should be happy.

Rebel XT

2005-06-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

To begin with, I'll add some information on the Digital Rebel XT (known as 350D outside US). It's one of the entry level Digital SLR's, although the features are not really entry level. Costing around 900US$ for the Camera and the kit lens (18-55mm), it's targetted towards the prosumer segment.
Some reviews of this gem:
DP Review
Photo.net review by Bob Atkins
Lense Suggestions by Bob Atkins

Other Information:
Canon's official site
Camera Manual
Software Installation Manual
Yahoo group for Rebel XT/350D

New XT Firmware
Interesting photography site
Cambridge Color
Tutorials