I finally had the chance to shoot a few photos with my new Canon 5D Mark II, and I am impressed with what I have seen so far. I wanted to see how far I could push the ISO of the camera and see what noise there was. I found that 1600 ISO there was hardly any notable noise. What got me was at 3200 ISO there was no color noise and the image had the feel of a slight grainy file photo, like when I would push Tri X 400 ASA film to 800 ASA. It was a very usable image and if you where looking for that old Tri-X film look the 5D Mark II dose a very nice job of it.

Next I wanted to try an HDR shoot with a lot of color and contrast to see how the camera held up. I have wanted to photography this old apartment building in down town St. Petersburg called the “glory”. It has that old Florida art deco look and is as bright aqua as you can get. I shoot it around noon so I would have good contrast, I have found that HDR can work in light that is usually considered bad light in the middle of the day, and allow you photograph when a lot of people are taking a break from shooting.

I set the camera to auto-bracket two stops plus and mines for this shot, this is the one thing I wish Canon would change and allow you at least a three stop bracket as they do in there 1D and 1Ds cameras. I hand held the camera and when I process the three images I will let Photoshop Auto-Align the photos and save the merged images as a Radices file to work on in PhotoMatax Pro. The 5D Mark II did a great job and it was easy to set the different functions on the camera, my 1DS Mark II has a very small LCD display, but the over twice the size and seemed bright in the Florida midday sun.

So far I am loving this camera and thinking of selling my 1Ds Mark II to buy another 5D as a back up camera so that I have all the same batteries and chargers instead of to different systems. I do think I am going to buy the battery grip to give the camera more of the feel of my old camera.

I finally received my 5D Mark II today, and by the time I charged the battery I didn’t any time to go out and test it out. So one of my favorite subjects looked me in the face (Okay, my camera lens.) I shot this image at ISO 1600 and there was not any notable noise at all, even in the shadows, where my 1Ds Mark II had a problem. I am looking forward to shooting with it this weekend, and I will have more to say next week.

I have been working on a photo shoot for the Tampa Bay History Center, and have come to the conclusion that I hate new palm trees. The city of Tampa had planted a thousand palms all around the museum with no green tops and had to deforest a state park to hold them up with 2×4s. OK maybe not a thousand, but I kid you not it had to be about two hundred and all where I needed to be to get the best photo. Here is a before and after of one of my nightmare shots where I had to take out all the 2×4s and put in palm tops.

By the time I was done with all the Photoshop work my hand was in a permanent shape of a claw for two days.
 

After

Before

I was at PhotoshopWorld last week in Boston and sat in on Rick Sammons Plug-in class as he showed a software program called Topaz that can give you a HDR effect with only one shot instead of taking three or more. After the session was done I went down to the trade show and brought the program. I have not had much time to play with it, but did try it on an image I use in the surreal class I teach. I wanted the grunge look and with messing around with the different sliders and very little time I was able to create this version of my cyborg image. From what I have seen so far it looks as if you could enhance an photo and bring out detail without giving it that illustrative or grunge look, I let you know how that goes when I have some time next week. 

By the way I showed Rick some of my HDR photos and he liked them so much, he asked me to be the Artist of the month on his web site: Plugin experance. Take a look and see some of the other plug-in out there. Here is the link: www.pluginexperience.com/Portfolio.html

Before

After

I want to announce that I will have the honor to write some tutorials for Chuck Vosburgh’s new site “Photography is Easy.” I look forward to adding to all the great information Chuck is posting on his site and hope you will take a look for yourself. Here is the web address: www.photographyiseasy.com. 
 

I was at NAPP/Kelby Training last week visiting friends and met up Larry Becker, the Director of NAPP, he informed me that one of my photographs had been the editor’s choice a few weeks back. Larry told me that he looks at all the new photos that get posted on the NAPP member’s galleries and selects a group of images he thinks are some of the best. He then calls in one the Photoshop Guys, who picks one to be the winner that week. The image that was selected was a shot I light painted with an 18 million-candle flash light and blended 32 different shots together and added window light for effect.

What I learned is that if you want to have a chance to have your photo picked you should change and upload images on a regular bases. Good Luck

Happy New Year to everyone, I hope your holidays were everything you hoped for. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, as I took some time off for the holidays and I was putting together a grant proposal for the city of Tampa’s Big Picture Photographer Laureate program. I have been working on my black & white images from Chicago I shot back in June. My goal is to have at least 20 images up on my web site by the end of the week. 

I have been using Adobe Lightroom to do the conversions to black & white and I have been very happy with the results. In a few images I have been able to get the sky to go almost black, the same way Ansel Adams did in some of his photography of Yosemite. This is an image of the “Bean” and it is a very reflective bean shaped sphere. Just a little tip if you want to get a clean photograph without a lot of people, get there very early in the morning as there is usually a mob of people standing around. I love the contrast of the distorted; in focus buildings on the Bean and the out of focus Buildings on the right side of the image. I think this shape and focus contrast works well in this photo.