Black Tern in flight alongside Hwy. 49, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/1600 sec. @ f/4, ISO 400 (neutral EV)

A Brief History of “Back-focus”

Last weekend I was at Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and experienced some focus problems with my Canon 7D heretofore non-existent, or so I thought.  Upon reviewing photographs from the 7D from the past several months, I noticed that none of them were actually as sharp as they could have been.  I attributed the softness to the lack of acutance in the files, and while I continue to believe that is an inherent property of cramming 18 megapixels into an APS-C format sensor, there was a real problem in play.

I didn’t want to believe that it could be a question of the camera “back-focusing” (or front-focusing) because I’ve grown to distrust people’s claims that their camera, and not their own inabilities, are to blame for their out-of-focus photographs.  I don’t remember these claims from the film days.  Perhaps I was just oblivious to the complaints, but I tend to believe that the instant feedback of the digital camera is partly to blame for the knee-jerk reaction that anything wrong with the pictures must be camera, not operator, error.

I will not mince words: ever since the Canon 10D and the Nikon D70, there’s been a lot of bitching and moaning in online forums about back-focused images, and I did not believe them.  At all.  Until now.

Now, I will argue that there is definitely operator error to blame in most many cases of complaints about back-focusing.  Last weekend I was convinced that I must have chosen the wrong focus point or didn’t have the AF locked by holding in the rear button–some prefer AF to only be activated by using the back button, I prefer AF to only be turned off if I hold in the back–and allowed AI Servo (Continuous AF for Nikonians) to screw up the focus.  To confirm my assumption, the next day I took test photographs in the garden around my parents house in Racine, Wis. and was shocked to discover that none of them were sharp.  Sure, the wind was to blame in a couple cases, but even when conditions were perfectly still the results were poor, so I rented a LensAlign from Lensrentals.com to investigate whether front or back-focus was to blame.

And what did I find after I unpacked and set up the LensAlign?  The 7D and the 5D Mark II both back-focused with the 400mm DO IS lens.  Well, there goes the neighborhood.  And a lot of preconceived ideas, with it.

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Tags: birds, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 7D, equipment, LensAlign, nature, Reviews, wildlife
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I have just re-listed the 1D Mark II N that I am selling on eBay as a $1200 Buy-It-Now offer.  With Bing.com Cashback, you could knock 8% off of that price.  Tell your friends!

Tags: EOS 1D Mark II N, for sale
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Derelict sailboat, Pugh Marina, Racine, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and Lensbaby Composer | Exposed 1/80 sec. @ f/4, ISO 200 (-1 1/3 EV)

On Saturday evening my dad and I went down to Pugh Marina in hopes of catching a moonrise.  But as we got to the lake, we saw a heavy haze on the horizon above Lake Michigan, and the hopes for a moonrise dimmed.  However, I took advantage of the fleeting golden-hour light to walk into a normally gated area at the marina that used to be chock full of derelict boats.  Evidently, the marina has been getting rid of them, because the gate was wide open (it actually has been for days–I just finally took the initiative to walk over to it) and only three remain.  I’m 99% certain that if you dropped this boat into the lake it would just sink.

In my last post about the Lensbaby I was hesitant to recommend it.  I will say that, after using the Lensbaby Composer some more, it does have a learning curve and I think the hardest thing to know is when to use which aperture with this lens.  This is especially true as you have to manually insert and remove the aperture “blades” (washers), and since it’s a rental I don’t want to risk carrying them around and losing them!  What I am slowly discovering is that I like this lens with a little more depth of field than it has wide open or even at “f/2.8.”  The image above was captured at f/4, and I think I may try f/5.6 in my next experiment.  Food for thought.

Tags: EOS 5D Mark II, equipment, Lensbaby Composer, Reviews
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When you don’t want razor sharpness…

I am currently in the process of properly calibrating the focus on my Canon lenses using the LensAlign system I rented after some recent frustrations with back-focusing while using the Canon 7D and 400mm DO IS lens.  At the same time, I am also experimenting with a Lensbaby Composer that I rented to round out the order. It offers the complete opposite of what I am seeking for my other lenses: fuzziness.  In fact, its effect is akin to a zoom blur, only far more consistent in its results than zooming a telephoto lens while dragging the shutter could ever be!

Mom walking out the front door, Racine, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and Lensbaby Composer | Exposed 1/320 sec. @ f/2.8, ISO 1600 (-2/3 EV)

One of the first things I noticed when using this lens is that its color rendition on my 5D Mark II left something to be desired.  I was prepared for and expected to have fun with the highly-selective focus / blurry nature of the Lensbaby, but I did not want wonky color to be a part of the experience.  As I wrote earlier this year, the X-Rite Colorchecker Passport can be an incredibly useful tool when a camera and lens combination is not yielding the kind of color that you expect.  Have two bodies and want similar color?  Profile both of them in the same lighting condition.

More after the jump!

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Tags: EOS 5D Mark II, equipment, Lensbaby Composer, Reviews
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Canada Goose on Dike Road, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/320 sec. @ f/4, ISO 1250

On a Sunday outing to Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, I ran into some of my first real frustrations with the Canon 7D.  While I’ve used it with the 400mm DO lens in the past, I was having tremendous difficulty getting photographs that I thought were in crisp focus.  Now, in all fairness, I’ve never thought that the images from the 7D were as crisp as they could be, even if they were still in sharp focus.  That is that the image acutance, or the contrast between individual pixels, is just not as high as other semi-pro or professional camera bodies, such like the 5D Mark II or 1D Mark III.  I believe this to be a function of Canon’s misguided decision to cram 18 megapixels into an APS-C sensor.  I would have been happy with 10-12 megapixels for a camera like this.  But I digress.

LensAlign Pro

The problem I encountered was not a question of not enough acutance–which would be corrected by sharpening in Lightroom or Photoshop–but many of the photographs were simply not in focus.  Before sending the camera to Canon for a fix, I compared its performance to my 5D Mark II as well as another 7D body from my dad.  The difference?  Night and day.

Tweaking the camera’s autofocus microadjustment panel seems to be the obvious answer.  Today, in an attempt to correct the problem, I tinkered with the 7D’s microadjustment with the 400mm lens and it would seem that the solution likely lies in that menu, but I am ill-equipped to calibrate the lens focus.  Enter LensRentals.com and the Lens Align.  While the professional LensAlign is $180, it’s available from LensRentals for an entire week for only $15.  It should get here Wednesday, and I will have an article reviewing this product and explaining its use after I get my 7D back in order.

Tags: birds, EOS 7D, equipment, problems, wildlife
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Bride and groom and a chimp at the Lakefront, Shoop Park, Racine, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/1600 sec. @ f/4, ISO 200.

A Sequence

My dad and I went down to Shoop Park in Racine, Wis. late this afternoon in hopes of getting some photographs of birds in flight.  Indeed, there were some Common Terns and Caspian Terns in addition to the usual mix of Herring and Ring-billed Gulls.

But the most interesting discovery was a couple having their post-wedding portrait taking on an old pier parallel to the one we were standing on.  I made a few pictures of them, and was amused by the interaction between the bride and groom, as well as their photographer who went from paying attention to them to chimping!

Tags: EOS 7D, photojournalism, sequence
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Boats anchored near Pugh Marina, Racine, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 135mm; exposed 1/400 sec. @ f/7.1, ISO 400.

Both Thursday and Friday night I went out to the lakefront in my hometown of Racine, Wis. to reacquaint myself with my old stomping grounds.  The light was a mixed bag both evenings, but the temperatures were mild and it was nice to see the lake that I grew up with.  It’s funny how much I grew to expect to have a significant body of water nearby, even though I didn’t grow up with boats.

When I was in school at Grinnell College, and when I moved to Columbia, Mo. for graduate school, the thing that drove me crazy was how landlocked those places were.  I don’t care if I get out onto the water–I’m not even that fond of swimming–but the Great Lakes (an ocean would do in a pinch, too) are to me what mountains are to some, and rivers are to others: the physical features that make us feel that we belong.

Funny that all of these examples are actually quite lethal environments.  The water wants us in it no more than the mountains want us atop them, and many people die every year in these beautiful places!  In any event, it’s good to be back for a little while as work on my master’s project.

More pictures after the jump!

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Tags: EOS 5D Mark II, Lake Michigan, landscapes
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Panasonic Lumix GH1

Of video and dSLR’s

One of the curious things that I noticed over the last year and a half at the University of Missouri–at least among the photojournalism students–was a rabid fascination with video from the Canon 5D Mark II.  I was one of the first ones in the program to actually buy one (August Kryger beat me by about a week and a half) in December 2009.

Other cameras sprang up that could do video, but people in the program seemed to wear blinders and were obsessed exclusively with 5D II video even though they did not even own a Canon camera or lens.

I say that this is frustrating because I know from first-hand experience that the 5D and the 7D are both very frustrating to use as video cameras, even though the resulting video looks great.  But for every second of good footage I’ve recorded, I’ve lost at least a minute of good material because of all of the physical limitations of using a dSLR for video: framing is a bit of a pain, autofocus is slow, setting up the exposure is also slow, daylight makes it hard to see the rear screen, and you can’t hand-hold it to save your life.  Despite these flaws, I believe that Canon and Nikon have been overly effective at making people believe that they are the only game in town.  Perhaps Olympus is a distant third.  This culture of ignorance of anything that is not Nikon or Canon appears to persist among those who should know better.

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Tags: equipment, video
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