If you use one of the popular Canon DSLRs, there's a good chance that there is no tethering for you! There is a tally of which cameras work with the tethering feature and which ones don't at 20SEVEN. Mine, a Canon 30D, does not. It stays busy. It is still possible to use Automator and a hot folder with the Canon software, so all is not lost. Nikon is much better supported than Canon.

The tethering feature is accessed via the File > Tether... menu. From there you can define import settings and start the session.

Tags: Aperture, Tethering, DSLR, Bugs, Automation, Canon, 30D, Nikon

RAW 2.0 on the left, RAW 1.1 on the right. What happened to my yellow?

That's a screen shot of a zoomed-in pair of versions of the same master. That's a startling difference. Neither has been adjusted in any way. And I was unable to get the yellow back without affecting the rest of the image. That may be my lack of understanding of the myriad controls, but I thought it would be straight-forward.

Update: The consensus among the comments is that RAW 1.1 is the culprit here and that I should be glad the bug has been fixed.

I am also noticing that Aperture now sharpens thumbnails. That has the effect of making some images look harsher than they really are when viewed in the browser. Again, RAW 2.0 on the left, RAW 1.1 on the right:

But RAW 2.0 does better on the highlights by default.

Tags: Aperture, RAW, Photography, DSLR

Aperture 2.0 has shipped. It needs Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.2. It's $200, down $199 from 1.0, and an upgrade is $99. If you purchased 1.5 recently then you can get it for $9.95.

Apple claims 100 new features that I have not had time to read yet.

Apple's Aperture page has many details. including the specs. The features page has some Quick Tours to watch and there are many tutorials. You download the User Manual, and a publication called Exploring Aperture. There is a compatibility checker that will see if your system can run it.

As usual there is active conversation (maybe less whining?) at Apple's Aperture discussion page.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Anticipation, RAW, DSLR

Juza has a very practical guide to macro and nature photography at Juza Nature Photography.

Tags: Photography, Macro, Bugs, DSLR

Hardmac is reporting that 10.5.2 will bring RAW support for Nikon D300 and D3 cameras.

Tags: Nikon, Mac OS X, Updates, RAW, DSLR

Digital Photography School shows how to shoot light trails. Some good advice on exposure, location, and other technique.

Tags: Photography, Light Trails, Learning, DSLR

There is a Wikipedia for cameras: Camerapedia. One of the things they list is my first SLR: the Olympus OM-30. The on-off switch is on the right in this image: protruding part on the ring around the film rewind knob. This meant that it was really easy to turn the camera on as you were putting it back into its case, and so completely run down the five very expensive button cells that it needed to operate.

Tags: Photography, Canon, Nikon, DSLR, History, Museum, Interesting Stuff, Olympus

Skates For Rent: 1/8s f/4.0 ISO1600 46mm, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8, adjusted

One of the reasons I spent the money on a DSLR was the ability to take good pictures with high ISO. My Canon 30D is a generation behind the state of the art at least, but it's such a huge improvement over my Canon S3 that it is worth it to me. I ran the S3 at ISO 100, or 200 when I needed some more speed. Above 200 the noise was just too bad.

With the 30D I can take pictures at ISO 1600 and get good results. ISO 1600 gives noise, but not horrible noise. The picture of roller skates above was taken in a dimly-lit roller-sking rink, hand-held, at 1/8s. I could dial up an aperture of f/4 to get a reasonable depth of field and still get a good final image. Image stabilization in the EF-S 17-55 lens made it possible of course.

Open Window: 1/20s f/2.8 ISO3200 -1ev173mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200mm IS L f/2.8

The 30D also has an ISO 3200 setting. It's a cheat though. All it does is multiply the numbers by 2. I get twice the brightness and twice the noise.

I try to use ISO 100 most of the time, but for indoor use will set it to 800. It would be a great help if the camera set the ISO automatically according to my preferences (ie as low as possible), but it does not. One more control to twiddle. The 40D is better at this, I hear, and Nikon has it right.

Tags: Canon, 30D, DSLR

Now I have a DSLR, I have sensor dust. I've one big annoying spot and several lesser spots that make their presence felt whenever I use smaller apertures . So, lacking a blower or other equipment to fix it, I use Aperture's Spot and Patch tool to deal with them. The spots are only visible against a plain background, so I don't have to fix all of them, just the really bad ones in certain images.

In the photo on the left, the original, the bad spot is visible above the horizon. After adjustment, the spot is worse because of the better contrast.
     
Once I go into full screen mode with F, the spot looks like this:

To fix it I bring up the adjustment HUD with H and then select Spot and Patch from the HUD:

This brings up a radius control dialog which allows me to drag the control to get the approximate size I want for the spot:

Over the image, the cursor turns into a target:

And once over the spot, I click and a yellow circle appears to mark my adjustment:

Inside the circle the spot is fainter, but it's not entirely gone. And it's hard to see what is going on with that yellow ring around the spot. To toggle the yellow ring off and then on again I press A, then X.

The problem is that my spot adjustment is a little too small. All it takes is a small change to the radius using the Spot and Patch controls:

I can make it vanish completely:

I press again A to restore the regular cursor and I'm done with that one. Gone!

Now I have a puzzle. I want to fix another spot, but how do I get the target cursor back? Selecting from the + menu on the HUD doesn't work -- it's grayed out -- because the control is already in use. There is no button on the control to add another spot, just a button to delete one.

The answer is to use the hidden menu at the top of the screen in full screen mode. Taking the cursor up to the top of the screen reveals the controls and shows the keyboard shortcut for Spot and Patch, X:

By pressing X, the Spot and Patch control is activated and a new target cursor appears that I can use to banish the other spots. In fact, I could have pressed X at the beginning to create the first spot adjustment had I wanted to.

If I have other images with spots that I want to fix, then as long as the camera has the same orientation, they will appear in the same place in each image. So I can use Lift and Stamp to get a head start on fixing the spots in those other images. Pressing O to select the Lift tool and clicking on the image gets me the Lifted parameters:

By unchecking the items I don't want and deleting all the adjustments except for the Spot and Patch (why no checkboxes for those?), I end up with what I want:

Now I can stamp that spot adjustment onto other images that need the same set of spots eradicated.

Unfortunately I can't rotate the coordinates as I Stamp to mimic rotating the camera. So for each of the three other camera orientations, I have to create a despotted image to have spot removal ready for Lifting. And the tool does not have a numeric coordinate input like the Crop tool does, so I can't just move numbers around to move the spot between orientations.

I also find that images with spot adjustments are very slow to process, at least on my machine, so I do them last. After the other things that are slow in fact: Straightening and Shadows and Highlights.

When I get a Rocket Blower, we'll see how well it works. The final image can be viewed here on Smugmug.

Tags: Aperture, Sensor Dust, Spot Tool, Adjustments, DSLR

Bird Over The Bay:1/800s f/9.0 ISO100 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, adjusted

One of the things I'm loving about my DSLR is that I no longer have to deal with the fog of an electronic viewfinder. They should really be called electronic fuzz makers: it's very difficult to know what you are taking a picture of. I've had many a surprise when I've looked at the result in Aperture and seen objects and detail that I had no idea existed at the time.

Now I can track things, see accurate color, be aware of detail, and, most importantly, know when things are in focus. And it makes manual focussing possible. Manual focussing with up and down buttons and an electronic viewfinder is just wretched. In the picture above I could wait until the bird banked in front of the lighter water so that it was recognizable and get the picture I wanted with ease.

Of course with the 30D I don't get a live preview, nor a flip-out screen (like the S3), so that makes it harder to get certain shots. Live preview is one advantage the 40D has over the 30D that would be useful to me.

Tags: DSLR, Viewfinder, Canon, 30D, 40D, S3

Pixel Peeper looks like a very useful site for researching lenses. It hosts links to images shot with specific lenses and cameras with the EXIF data organized in a database. This allows you to see what kind of shots are possible with a lens and camera combination you are considering. With my 30D I have the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 and the EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS.

Tags: DSLR, Lenses, Canon

Another reason for going DSLR is sharpness. Although I could get sharp images with the S3, such as this teddy bear (click for original):

Teddy bear: 1/160s f/4.5 16.8mm, Canon S3 IS, unadjusted

I could not get them all the time and not across the whole image. And I had to exchange sharpness for something else all the time because of the inconsistency.

This one is taken with the Canon 30D. It uses the camera's saturation set to +2 but is otherwise unmodified and unsharpened:

Embassy Suites: 1/1000s f/8 ISO 400 -0.3ev, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS, unadjusted

It's very sharp, at least to my eyes. And testing this lens I find it sharp all the way to f2.8. The 70-200 f2.8L IS lens I have is even sharper, and sharpest at f2.8. I reckoned that my chances of getting a bad lens from Canon were small. Reports I see say that these are consistently good lenses, and my experience bears that out.

Tags: DSLR, Sharpness

Feeding swallows: 1/4000s f/5.6 ISO1000 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted and cropped

A big reason for going DSLR rather than sticking with the Canon S3 that I had is speed. Everything is faster. The 30D can shoot five frames a second compared to the S3's two frames a second. The photo above was part of such a burst: it had to be. The parent swallow was feeding its young in about two thirds of a second. Here are the frames:

While it can do five a second, I usually leave it on the three frames a second setting, because that leaves a lesser chance of shooting off two frames when I mean to shoot one. The swallows were shot at 1/4000s f5.6 ISO 1000.

The shutter speed of the S3 tops out at 1/3200, and that is only effective for f/8. It's half that for f/3.5.The photo below was taken at 1/8000s, as was the fountain picture I have posted previously.

Dogs playing: 1/8000s f/4.0 ISO800 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, unadjusted

The higher shutter speed of the 30D gives me more range for a specific aperture, as well as being able to better freeze the action and use larger apertures.

Start-up time is zero. I don't turn the 30D off, just let it sleep, so there is no turn on time. I press the shutter and it wakes up and takes a photo. No waiting for the lens to extend.

Focusing is very fast and accurate. I tap the shutter and it focusses, simple as that, in a fraction of a second. No one-second delay while it hunts around for enough contrast. And the 30D almost always gets focus first time: only a few times when the light is very dim and I have pointed it at something flat has it failed to focus.

Zooming is manual, so it goes as fast as I can turn the ring. I no longer have to wait for the motor to whirr and the zoom to zoom.

The controls are faster too. Changing exposure offset or aperture is a quick flick of a dial. No press press press on buttons to go up and down, or trips to the menus.

Tags: DSLR, Speed, Swallows

Canon has announced the Powershot S5 IS and dpreview has the details. It uses the DIGIC III processor, has a hot shoe, and a bigger flip screen. Now 8 megapixels in the sensor.

I have the Canon S3 IS and am planning to replace it next spring. Do I get an S5 or go for an DSLR?

Tags: Canon, S3, S5, Photography, DSLR, Interesting Stuff

As seen on Daring Fireball, Philip Greenspun has a very clear and practical guide for anyone considering buying a digital SLR on his site photo.net. Lots of other useful material on the site to explore as well.

Tags: Photography, DSLR, Buying, Interesting Stuff

Much opinion on Slashdot about DSLRs, SLRs, and Point and Shoot cameras. Not as rabid as it could be.

Although I used to have an SLR, it is now a dust collector following a decade of unuse. I got back into photography in 1997 when the Apple Quicktake 200 came out. Apple gave me one free with a new Mac, and I was soon enthralled with the 640x480 images it put onto 2Mbyte Flash cards. I haven't gone DSLR yet because I don't have a specific photographic need, and without that I would end up much poorer and with a huge bag of lenses. I do want the quality, but the freedom and portability of the Canon S3 fits the bill for now.

Tags: DSLR, Interesting Stuff, Photography