Dolly on the wing-back chair, November 2007, Racine, Wis. | Canon 1D Mk. IIN and 300mm f/4L lens | Exposed 1/80 sec. @ f/4, ISO 1000

It was so easy to say “hello” at the Humane Society all those years ago.  Sleeping in a cage adorned with a sign that read “I need a home for Christmas” was the cat who would come into our home and into our hearts in time to discover the joy of shredded wrapping paper under the tree.  This little but loving nine pound ball of fur named Dolly has been in my life since I was in the fifth grade.  Mom always said that Miss Dolly was going to sleep her life away, and indeed she spent at least 18 hours a day in one of her many nests throughout the house.  She lived a good life as an indoor cat.

Sure, she clearly wished she could go outside sometimes so that she might suck the breath out of the local wildlife, as evidenced by her cackling at the window and powerful flicks of her tail against the tabletop.  For a stretch she perfected the art of indoor hunting.  My parents were especially happy when Dolly’s interest in mousing indoors waned, as waking to a cat gleefully taunting its prey at the foot of the bed was a little too much for them.  She was trouble, but the best kind.  Most nights she’d patrol the yard from atop a wing-back chair in the living room while we turned in to bed.

Dolly lived a long life, and we’re better for having her in ours.  And while it’s one of the hardest things to do, today we all had to say goodbye.  Living in North Carolina, I couldn’t be there.  But none of us will ever forget that tabby cat.  Dolly, you’re loved.

Content © 2011 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Personal Stories | Tags: Canon 300mm f/4L, EOS 1D Mark II N, family

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: EOS 1D Mark II N, for sale

Canon 1D Mark II N body and accessories for sale - two chargers, two batteries, original (un-used) strap, and AC power adapter

I tried to sell my 1D II N on eBay the other week as a “buy it now” outright purchase, but there were no takers.  It’s now listed as an auction.  Happy bidding!

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Announcements | Tags: EOS 1D Mark II N, for sale

Canon 1D Mark II N body and accessories for sale - two chargers, two batteries, original (un-used) strap, and AC power adapter

At the end of April I announced that I intended to sell my Canon 1D Mark IIN camera body that has served me well since the summer of 2007.  As of this morning, the camera and accessories can be purchased through my eBay listing; I am asking for $1,300.00 US Dollars (or best offer).  If you are interested, please view the listing on eBay.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Announcements | Tags: EOS 1D Mark II N, equipment, for sale

Canon 1D Mark II N body and accessories for sale - two chargers, two batteries, original (un-used) strap, and AC power adapter

I have decided it is finally time to say goodbye to a good friend, my Canon 1D Mark II N camera body.  I purchased this camera new in the summer of 2007; it was one of the last on the shelves of Adorama as the 1D Mark III had just been released.  This camera has been with me to a number of places across the country, as well as to Kenya and the Galapagos Islands.

In total, there have been 82,436 shutter actuations according to 1D Count; the shutter is rated over 200,000 exposures.  In January, I sent the body to Canon for a “clean and check” and they replaced the hot shoe, adjusted its shutter speed, exposure, and focusing systems, and otherwise brought the camera back up to factory settings.  Since then, I’ve photographed one basketball game, and then put the camera away, waiting for the right time to sell it.  I believe that time to be now.

Cosmetically, the camera does show signs of wear (see photos below), including a few scratches on the top of the body, along the prism.  There’s also some worn paint near the top shutter button, and a small scratch on the bottom of the body, on the back-right corner.

I am selling the camera body, original box, original charger, original AC adapter, original strap (never used–I used my own strap), and an original Canon NiMH battery.  I am also including a Camera Devices-brand NiMH battery (which is actually of higher-capacity than the OEM battery), and a Camera Devices-brand wall charger.  This is the charger I actually used the most with this camera, as it was much smaller than the bulky Canon-branded charger.

I am asking $1,400.00 US Dollars for the kit, and that includes FedEx Ground shipping within the United States.

I would prefer to keep the sale limited to North America–I’m sorry, but I had a bad experience selling overseas when I sold my Canon 5D.  Please e-mail me or leave a comment (I will not publish it to keep your privacy) if you are interested in the camera.

A cashier’s check would be preferable, although I will also accept personal checks.  I will wait until the check clears before shipping the camera.  Alternatively, if you are willing to pay the extra 3% that they charge, I will accept PayPal money transfers provided that the address on your PayPal account matches the shipping address you ask me to deliver to.

If the camera doesn’t sell within the next two weeks, I will list it on eBay.  I’ll post a link to the auction should I do that.

Thanks for looking and feel free to e-mail me with any questions you might have!

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | One comment | Filed under Announcements | Tags: EOS 1D Mark II N, equipment, for sale

Missouri women's basketball forward Jessra Johnson, left, fails to prevent Oklahoma's center, Abi Olajuwon, from making a two point shot on Wednesday, 20 Jan. 2010 at Mizzou Arena in Columbia, Mo. Olajuwon wears the same number as her father, Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon, from his college career. The Tigers lost 61-62 to the Sooners. | Canon 1D IIn and 50mm f/1.4 lens; exposed 1/1250 sec. @ f/1.4, ISO 800. | Color corrected with X-Rite Color-checker Passport.

The Set-up

Last Wednesday I found myself sitting on the court at Mizzou Arena in Columbia, Mo. with two different camera bodies and three different lenses.  So, what’s the problem?  The 7D and the 1D Mark IIn see colors differently.  Add to the equation that the glass in a lens affects the color rendered in the final photograph.  For newspaper photography, usually captured in JPEG instead of RAW, this is just something you would normally “live with.”

Maybe you’d just take two identical bodies and figure no one will notice the difference once its printed on Charmin, any ways.  But online, the differences can be stark.  Take, for instance, this Columbia Missourian slideshow where I was using my 7D and a 1D Mark III on loan from CPS, but my colleague Chris Dunn was using an older D2Xs body at the football game between MU and Kansas State.  This is an extreme example, but it is amusing to watch Kansas State’s jerseys suddenly jump from purple to blue depending on which camera was used.  Hint: Nikon didn’t figure out what purple “looked” like until the D3 and D300 came out.

Article continues!

A Solution

Joel Kowsky holds up the X-Rite Color-checker Passport to calibrate my 1D IIn for Mizzou Arena's lighting.

I first read about the X-Rite Color-checker Passport back in early November when Michael Reichmann posted his own review of the product.  Essentially, it is a miniature Gretag-Macbeth color chart in a collapsible, hard, plastic case.  It features a white balance target, as well as a set of “warming” and “cooling” white balance squares (when neutral simply isn’t the look you want).

But the magic of the chart isn’t that you have an idea of how color should be rendered in a certain space, like Mizzou Arena.  No, the power of this tool is that it integrates with Adobe Lightroom, and can be used to make individual camera profiles.  The only catch is that the photographs must be captured in RAW in order to take full advantage of this tool.

For some people, including many of the people I work with at the University of Missouri, that would be a deal-breaker.  However, for anyone who is truly serious about color management, this is an obvious tool to have, and it actually speeds up your toning workflow.  You profile your monitor (you do profile your monitor, right?), you can calibrate your printer for specific paper types, why not calibrate your camera, too?  Fortunately, X-Rite makes the process fairly simple.

Missouri's RaeShara Brown pivots around Oklahoma's defense Wednesday night at Mizzou Arena in the Tigers fifth straight loss. Brown had 12 points in 31 minutes. The Sooners won 62-61. | Canon 7D and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 70mm; exposed 1/1000 sec. @ f/4, ISO 3200. | Color corrected with X-Rite Color-checker Passport.

Procedure

It really makes the most sense to use the Color-checker Passport when you know that the color is important (studio work comes to mind), or you want consistency across two cameras.  For a basketball game, 100% accurate color doesn’t really matter.  However, I wanted to confirm that this tool really could help to “sync” the color between the two bodies.

First, you photograph the target with each camera and lens combination you plan to use under a given lighting situation.  The target should take up at least 10% of the viewfinder, so it need not be frame-filling to work, although it doesn’t hurt if it does.  While you’re at it, flip the chart around and shoot the white balance target.  Make a custom white balance from this target.  Make your pictures.

When you get home, download everything into Lightroom and find your Color-checker Passport images.  To create a profile, all you do is click on “export,” and use X-Rite’s plug-in to make the camera profile.  It chugs away while you continue sorting your pictures before alerting you to the successful creation of the profile.  Lightroom must exit and restart in order to find the profile that was created.  It is then accessible at the bottom of the “Develop” tab, under “Camera Calibration.”

Choosing the custom camera profile built by the X-Rite Color-checker Passport's software.

At this point, if you don’t find the results to be completely accurate, you can still adjust the tint and saturation of the RGB sliders.  This setting can then be copied and pasted into the other photos made with the same camera and lens combination, or you can even make it a Develop Preset.  If you really want, you can have this camera calibration the new default for that camera body, although I would prefer to stick to Adobe’s own dual-illuminant DNG camera profiles as the default.

Dual-what?

When you select “Adobe Standard” as the camera profile in “Camera Calibration,” you are choosing a Dual-Illuminant DNG profile.  All of the profiles built by the X-Rite software are based on the open DNG RAW format.  The difference between a normal and a “dual-illuminant” profile is better explained in practice.

There are two possible routes for using the Color-checker Passport: to make individual profiles for specific lighting conditions and lenses, or to make a profile that understands two lighting conditions all in one.  That is, you could make one profile that understands daylight and tungsten lighting.  But wait, there are so many variations in tungsten lighting!  Why not make a profile to cover two extremes of tungsten light?  And another that handles the extremes of florescent bulbs–to the super-green grocery store light tot the nearly tungsten?  The possibilities are (sort of) endless.

I have only worked with the normal profiles so far, but plan to build my own dual-illuminant profiles soon.

A Quirk of Note

I have found that, on occasion, the Lightroom plug-in fails to generate a profile.  This seems to happen more with my Panasonic G1, the Olympus PEN Ep-1, and also my Canon EOS 7D files.  The solution that I have found is to manually export a DNG file that you specify to be compatible with versions 4.x and earlier, and creating the profile with the desktop version of the X-Rite plug-in.  X-Rite does appear to be aware of this issue and  will likely release a patch soon.

Bottom Line

When all is said and done, I think that the X-Rite Color-checker Passport is a surprisingly useful tool, especially for color-management gurus.  How useful?  The only difference between the images below, from the 1D Mark IIn, left, and the 7D, right, from the ones displayed earlier in this article is that the “Camera Calibration” has been set back to the Adobe default.  Suddenly, Oklahoma’s jerseys don’t match across the two pictures.  Would some toning fix it?  Sure, but this way, a step is simplified in the workflow–and it’s quickly and easily applied to all of my pictures from the event.

Shameless Plug: If you decide to purchase a Color-checker Passport, please consider doing so either through my referral links to B&H or Amazon.com.

Canon 1D Mark IIn, left, and 7D, right, without the use of the X-Rite Color-checker Passport.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Columbia Missourian, Reviews | Tags: basketball, color management, EOS 1D Mark II N, EOS 7D, photojournalism, Reviews, sports, X-Rite Color-checker Passport

What I didn’t mention much in my previous posting was the sad state of my 1D II N’s viewfinder.  It completely fogged up after coming home, and I immediately began to kick myself for not sealing it in a plastic bag before taking it inside, as the viewfinder had not been a problem–had not been fogged up–before bringing it in.  Absolutely brain-dead stupid!!!

1D II N with rear viewfinder cover plate / convex lens removed.

Anyone who knows me well knows that one of my greatest personality flaws is my impatience.  When I want something to work, I want it to work right now.  I also have a tendency to tinker with the electronics that I own; when they stop working and they’re within warranty, I’ll send them in for repairs.  Why not?  But when something is long-since out of warranty, I have the proper tools, and the fix looks like something anyone can do, why should I spend lots of money to FedEx the product to the manufacturer to have them do exactly what I could have done, and have them bill me for it?

Story continued after the jump!

Rear cover / convex lens plate removed from my 1D II N.

The 1D II N is a weather-sealed (not water-proof, but very water-resistant) camera body, so I was surprised that as much moisture penetrated the viewfinder assembly as it did–the fogging was VERY intense–it was essentially opaque.  I tried placing the body in a pillowcase and running a hair-dryer in it, but that did nothing to help the situation.  So, I lad the back of the body on a bed of rice overnight, hoping that it clear up as did the cell phone and lens.  However, this was not the case.  I began to think that the simplest thing would be to pop the back plate off of the viewfinder so that dry air could penetrate inside and clear up the problem.

Enter the best toolkit ever:

Wiha System 4 toolkit outfitted with a few "extras."

A couple of years ago, Artie Morris recommended to me what he espoused was the best toolkit a photographer could have.  Once I bought one, I realized he was right.  The Wiha System 4 toolkit provides six slotted and four Philips screwdrivers as well as an anti-static screwdriver handle.  It all comes in a compact case, which leaves plenty of room to pack it with some other essential items: a hex key for the Arca-Swiss-style quick release plates, the Torx keys for my Gitzo tripod and monopod, needle-point sharp forceps (for grabbing lint from the mirror box of my cameras), forceps designer to hold small screws, and a small tube of blue Loc-Tite thread-locker to hold screws so they won’t accidentally work themselves back out when I put back together the various products with which I am tinkering / repairing.  Because you should always return something in better condition than the way that you found it.

I just needed the two smallest Philips screwdrivers to remove the six screws that held in place what is possibly the most weakly-sealed part on the 1D II N.

The Wiha System-4 kit comes with six slotted and four Philips screwdriver tips. Perfect for working with the small screws found in cameras, lenses, and accessories.

After 12 hours sitting in a Ziploc container full of rice, the rear viewfinder was finally de-fogged and good-as-new.  Of course, I think the worst case scenario would have been calling Canon’s parts department and ordering a replacement.  But I’m happy that it didn’t come to that!

All dried up!

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: Canon, condensation, EOS 1D Mark II N, fog, moisture, repairs, viewfinder