I was recently looking out for some white vinyl background to replace the muslin sheet I’ve been using. I managed to get some from an unlikely source. At Christmas I found a company in Glasgow that supplies vinyl for the sides of HGV trailers. lastolite have a wipe-clean vinyl background which I think is almost £200 for 2.5 metres by about 6 metres. I managed to get a roll of white vinyl for around £40 for 3 metres by 7 metres, even with the £30 delivery, this still represents a significant saving.

So how did it perform?

It’s heavy, I needed help to fit the thick card roll onto my background stand.

At 7 or 8 metres there is plenty to form a good length train. The setup above is in my front room. I used my older eBay (Hong Kong) lights on the background & the newer Elinchroms as the main flash. Note the card spill-killer boards clamped to the background lights to prevent light straying on to the model.

Unfortunately, I found the battery on my flash meter had run out & being as they take a non-standard sized battery I was a bit stuck, so I had to use the old fashioned way, setting the light power & checking the shots until I had a decent combination of aperture & shutter speed. hapily, it only took a couple of shots to sort. I hooked up the camera to my laptop & shot tethered so that Laura could instantly see the results of her modelling.

We even got Tess in on the action, although she’s not the most confident of models.

All in all, I’m really pleased with the new background. It will be a useful addition to my studio kit.

Posted under Photo Equipment, Photo Shoots

So here is the new baby.

Shots taken in the light tent with 2 studio lights either side triggered with the Pocket Wizzard remote flash triggers. These shots were taken on the 20D with Tamron 90mm macro lens.

I went & did it this week.

On Monday I drove about 90 miles to collect a new lens. This really is the dream lens for me. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase a real top quality lens in the form of the Canon 600mm F4 L.

This is one hell of a beast. It weighs more than a small child, well, five & a half kilograms. This means that it really isn’t hand-holdable.

I tried it in the garden when I got back & got some nice images of some of the birds on the feeders. I used a tripod for this. I bought a Manfrotto 393 head which is a balanced gimbal affair. Once the lens is mounted & balanced you can more or less point it in whatever angle & direction you want & the lens will stay there. Early results with it are pretty favourable, you can literally move & operate the camera with one hand. It seems to work really well on the monopod.

The cost of this lens is pretty prohibitable. If it wasn’t for a recent ‘windfall’ I’d never be able to afford one.

Canon, Nikon & some of the other major manufacturers are putting their prices up. Apparently this is due to the current weakness of the pound.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of the beast for several weeks, if not months. Warehouse Express were offering it for about £5,400 two or three weeks ago. This crept up to £5,999 up to about a week or so ago. A day or two before I purchased mine, they put the price up to £6,499. I just checked before writing this entry & they have it on their site for an eye-watering £7,129.

Fortunately I didn’t buy it from W.E. and so got it for a much more reasonable price!

More info & pics to come…

I had a delivery a couple of days ago. Some new gear arrived as I update & upgrade.

I got hold of the Canon 1.4 & 2x converters which will be a useful addition for some extra reach to my zooms & telephotos. They don’t fit all lenses; you need to be careful you make sure the lens you’re going to stick them on will take it as the front element of the converter protrudes into the lens and a lot of lens’s rear element will bash against it.

I can use them on the 100-400L but it loses autofocus. It is fully compatible with the 70-200 f2.8 L IS, which is just as well since this was also in the package! You also lose a stop or two of light when fitted.

Topping it off was a Canon EX 580 MkII flashgun. I currently have the Sigma 500 DG Super, but now I have some better gear, I’m moving over to Canon. I’ve put in an order for another which should arrive next week.

I also got hold of a Gary Fong Lightsphere. I’ve seen a few videos of these and the results look pretty good. They are basically a professional version of my DIY Flash Diffuser.

I’m nearly there with the new gear; I have a couple of lenses coming this week, a wide angle which will replace my Sigma 10-20mm as that lens doesn’t work too well on full-frame cameras, and a macro. Then, I’m looking for a decent prime telephoto to help kickstart some wildlife & sports photography.

I’ve had the chance to take a few shots with the new 5D MkII. I’ve not really done any proper comparative testing yet but I’ve been impressed with the results so far; things are looking quite promising.

Take the following shots. I took these the day before we bought a new car. As I had the cash, we decided to have a bit of photography fun with it and use it as a prop in some shots.

When I loaded the shots into Lightroom, I was immediately struck by the detail. They are instantly much sharper than the 20D’s RAW files. Canon has always had a bit of a reputation for soft photos which need to be sharpened up in software. The 5D MkII’s files are so much sharper.

Take a look at the following shots. The first shot on each line is the full frame. They have not been processed in any way other than saving as a TIF & adding a border; no sharpening has been added. The second on each line is a 100% crop from the original which shows the level of unprocessed detail available.

Pretty impressive, eh? (well it is if you’re used to the results of a 20D!)

Three years & two months after getting my first DSLR (Canon 20D) I have now gotten myself a brand new camera.

The Canon 5D MkII came out in December & has been in short supply ever since. I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 weeks checking out the websites to see what the price was doing, who was doing it cheapest & who actually had it in stock.

It seems that many companies only had enough stock to fulfill pre-orders & many of those couldn’t even fulfill their current orders let alone any new purchases. Most of the photography supplier websites don’t have it & can’t tell you when they will get new stocks from Canon.

Play.com had the lowest prices I’ve seen for the 5D MkII. They were offering the body only at £1899 & the 24-105L f4 IS for £2499, about £550 off the RRP which many suppliers are advertising at full price.

So I checked Play.com every day up until the time I knew the required money to fund it would be in the bank account. A couple of days before they suddenly showed the kit out of stock, but they did have body only, right up until 6 hours before the cash came into my bank account. As soon as it did, I checked Play.com and it was no longer in stock.

Pretty well-founded rumours are suggesting the major manufacturers are hiking their prices some time in January due to the low value of the pound, already we’re seeing prices start to rise. The Canon 1000D we bought for £299 4 weeks before Christmas rose to £314 2 weeks later & is now being sold at £342.54 at the same site we bought it from.

I managed to find Park Cameras with the 5D MkII in stock. It was £1,999 one day and £2,099 the next. The dilemma was, do I go for it now in case the price rises or wait in the hope it will come down for who knows how many weeks.

I couldn’t resist, last Wednesday I ordered one over the phone. I wanted the 24-70L f2.8 rather than the kit 24-105 but they didn’t have that lens in stock so I ordered the body only, by the end of the phone call I’d changed my mind & got the 24-105 for £2,499. Despite being told it wouldn’t arrive until Friday as I’d missed the last despatch time, it arrived the next day.

I can’t find anyone with any stock of batteries & the battery grips seem to be in even shorter supply than the cameras themselves, but I did find Jacobs have them in stock and hopefully, one will be arriving tomorrow.

It’s a lovely camera. I’ve only used it twice so far but I’m loving it. The first thing that strikes you is the feel; it’s pretty solid & weighty & feels like a decent bit of kit. The sound of the shutter is sooo much better than the 20D & the 3″ screen on the back is amazing. Mind you, with the minuscule screen of the 20D, anything bigger has got to be a major improvement.

More to come….

I may have mentioned before that I intend to upgrade my equipment in January 2009. This will involve replacing the trusty old 20D with something a little more updated.

Initially I was toying with the idea of the Canon 1D MkIII or the more expensive 1Ds MkIII, however, the Canon rumour mill is suggesting that replacements for either or both these cameras will come in 2009. I therefore don’t want to spend the money on a camera which will be replaced possibly only a few months later.

The 5D MkII is out now and looks promising. I’m now leaning towards getting that in January and then a 1D MkIV (or whatever it will be called) if Canon announce that next year.

I get my Canon rumours from the Northern Images website. The latest info is suggesting a possible announcement by Canon in the first quarter of 2009.

In the meantime, I’ll have some fun with the 5D MkII together with some new lenses.

I plan to upgrade my equipment in January. A new camera and some high-end lenses are on the wish list.

Just when I thought I’d decided what to get Canon go & release the new 5D MkII. This has kind of set the cat amongst the pigeons as far as my new camera goes. I’d planned on replacing the 20D with either the 1D Mk III or even the 1Ds Mk III. The 5D has upped the ante with its new 21mp full-frame sensor, expanded ISO rating up to 25,600 & HD video recording mode. It now equals the 1Ds MK III in terms of resolution & is over two grand cheaper.

The dilemma now is that the 1D Mk III is being left behind, Sony have just released the Alpha 900 with 24mega pixels. If I get the 1D Mk III, am I buying in to old technology?

Visit any of the camera forums & they are rife with rumour & suggestion that Canon will be replacing the Mk IIIs in 2009. Anything from 16mp up to 34 are being suggested with further rumours that Canon may release a 50mp DSLR. Some suggestions are leaning towards a February release, they say Canon will need to release a replacement for the Mk IIIs as they are already getting left behind by the Nikon D3, among others.

So, do I go with a Mk III or hold off on the basis of these rumours for the replacement which may not even come next year?

I suppose I could get a 5D Mk II in the meantime & then see whatever replaces the Mk IIIs. You can read more on the Canon replacements at Northlight Images’ Rumour Section.

I have about 2 or 3 compact flash cards which I use when I’m out and about on a shoot. Rather than having bucketfuls of cards I prefer to save my shots straight from the cards onto a portable hard drive. For the last 3 years I’ve been using a 40GB Vosonic XS-Drive, which is a small battery-operated device with slots for several different memory card formats. You slot in the card, press the transfer button & it saves your shots onto the hard drive. When I get home I transfer them across onto the PC.

When I upgraded the PC I also changed to Vista (bloody awful experience but that’s another story. One of the things which didn’t work ever again with the Vista PC was the XS-Drive. So I had to transfer my shots onto the kids’ PC, then save them out onto either DVDs or USB memory sticks & then out onto my PC.

This was a complete pain so, to be honest, when the XS-Drive died recently, I wasn’t too annoyed.

I researched around for a new device but decided I’d prefer to have a viewing capability so needed one with a screen. The Epson ones look pretty good but at around £400 are a bit out of my price range. In the end I settled for the Vosonic VP 5500. I got mine from WarehouseExpress delivered the next day. They were out of stock on the 160GB so I got a 120GB version.

They have a great little 3.5inch TFT screen. They come with a replaceable SATA hard drive, so they can be upgraded with a bigger drive. They do eat the battery if viewing a lot of photos but at about £6 via eBay you can get spare Fuji batteries for them, so I have a spare which I charge up & take with me; they just slot in via a tab at the bottom, no screwdriver required.

They view many RAW files direct so you can view your shots straight away. With the small LCD screen of the 20D, this is an ideal alternative to viewing your shots in the field.

I’ve only used it a couple of times but am already finding it a really useful addition to the kit setup.

I got a laptop last week. I’ve not owned a laptop since I had a second-hand old 386 many years ago. I still have it in the loft somewhere.

Having used one at the baby Shoot I did a while ago so I could show Mums their shots there & then (I borrowed my wife’s) I thought it would be a good addition to the armoury. It will also mean I don’t have to spend so much time shut away on the main machine in what I euphamistically call ‘the office’. I might still spend far too long on a computer but at least I can do it in the front room with my family.

I bought a Asus Notebook A7U-7P274C AMDTL58 1.9GHz 2048MB 250GB 17" widescreen DVD-SM WLAN webcam card reader Vista Home Premium 2 year manufacturer’s warranty, phew! If you’re interested in the spec you can see it here. I purchased it from ebuyer & got it for £399 including VAT which was a pretty damned good price considering it’s currently on offer for £472 on MicroDirect’s website, which usually is fairly competitive. It’s currently out of stock, I’m not surprised as it seemed like a great deal for the specification, eBuyer gets most of my custom for PC-related stuff & has done for several years, their prices are usually among the best.

I’ve stuck Lightroom & Photoshop CS3 on there and although slower than my desktop, it seems to perform OK. Mind you, my desktop has 6GB RAM compared to the Laptop’s 2. It’s got a 17" screen which is great for graphics work. I’m currently processing some of my F1 Testing shots on there.

I got a USB mini-mouse as I can’t get used to those bloody touchpad thingies. I could always plug the Bamboo into it for graphics work.