Beach Walk with the 7D

Perhaps because its firmware had just be upgraded, I naturally picked up the 7D this morning for a walk around the beach.  Although some are saying that focusing is quicker with firmware 2.0.0, if so, I didn’t notice it.  This is not to say that focusing is slow with the 7D, I just did not notice a change.  In fact, this morning, I did not notice any changes at all from the firmware upgrade.

Perhaps I was really just walking although I did grab a few shots using the 70-200 mm zoom – my usual choice for walking the beach. 

For this shot, I was wishing for the 100-400mm zoom at max zoom; instead, this image is cropped to about 1/4 of the frame.  This just goes to show what you can get away with so long as the display is on screen over the ‘net.

While walking, I suddenly realized that a dolphin was surfacing and grabbed a few shots – again wishing for a longer lens but with considerable cropping turned out OK.

None of these are particularly outstanding shots but, with the walk, made for a pleasant morning.

G12: Time Lapse

While vacationing last week, I made another time lapse video of the sunrise on Destin, Florida beach.  As last year, the G12 was used in the process.  Shot from the same balcony at roughly the same time, this year’s video eerily resembles last year’s video.  So much for creativity!

Why use the G12 instead of the G1X?  Well, as noted previously, the G1X yields only about 1500 shots in a two hour period before running out of battery.  The G12 yields about 2500 shots over a longer period of time.  If I’d planned a little more carefully, the G1X would have been more than adequate.  Instead, I fired up the G12 and took a walk with the G1X.

Canon’s EOS M was officially announced during my vacation.  I’ve been reading about its specs as well as its pros and cons – not to mention opinions from enthusiasts.  I’ll have more to say about the EOS M in another post.

Beach Walk

Some of my better snapshots (‘cause that’s about all they really are) while walking the beach early in the morning.  All these were taken with my Canon 7D and 70-200 mm zoom.  The 70-200mm is my usual choice for outdoors even though sometimes I was wishing that the G1X was in my pocket for a wider angle photo during these walks.

G1X: Rainy Day

Although hoping for a beautiful sunset, water and beach scene, I was determined to take a picture of something and this was the best I could do.  Actually, I like it and have added it to my G1X collection at Smugmug.

This picture was taken at ISO 200, 1/15 second and f4.5 at a mid-zoom focal length.  The G1X was in manual focus mode at minimum focus distance – roughly 15 inches or so.  Although I could have elected to increase the ISO setting, I decided instead to brace the camera against the car seat and accept the 1/15 second shutter speed.

7D around the Harbor

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I took the 7D and 70-200mm IS f2.8 for an early morning walk around the beach and harbor hoping for a few good shots in addition to a practice session. The image above was the very first shot and is the in-camera JPEG. I’ve decided that I prefer the “Landscape” profile instead of the “Standard” profile. The difference as indicated by the menu is only one more notch of sharpness for Landscape but it seems to me that there are additional differences. Anyway, all these shots were taken with the Landscape profile.

Although the sky was rapidly brightening, a part of the harbor was still somewhat dark so I was tinkering with various ISO, aperture and shutter speeds. A few birds were flying so I increased the shutter speed to 1/800 and tried my hand at BIF (which I learned only recently is “Bird in Flight”!) without much success. The shot below was taken at ISO 400, f8 and 1/800 using AI Servo. Unfortunately, it is about 2 stops underexposed so I decided to push the exposure in the recently released ACR 5.6 RAW converter. The result was quite noisy so Noiseware was applied to reduce the noise. The resulting cropped shot below probably represents ¼ the original image size. Not very good but at least somewhat usable.





Later that morning, I came across some fishermen cleaning their catch and attracting many Brown Pelicans. This became a very active shooting session with many quick shots and much movement. All in all, I was more satisfied with the 7D than with my own skills.

The shots above and below would be more impressive if cropped but give an idea of the scene quickly developing in front of me. I was literally just swinging the 7D to my eye and pressing the shutter button.

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More G9 Pictures

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While walking on the beach one recent morning, I managed to get a few nice shots with my G9 and have added them to my G9 gallery on SmugMug. All were shot at ISO 80, handheld, no polarizing filter (because it was early morning), raw mode with raw conversion in Adobe Camera Raw followed by a touchup in Photoshop CS3. No noise reduction was applied in ACR or with other software; this is my normal practice for G9 ISO 80 files. The image of the reeds was at near full zoom and 1/25 second - I was impressed!

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll be quick to admit to more than one shot of each of these scenes. In fact, I'm bad about photographing a scene over and over with slight variations of exposure and composition. This habit really paid for the photo of the shell on the sand. While waiting for a wave to come up and in, the sun suddenly poked through the early morning cloud cover and the resulting shadows changed the picture completely.
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Back to Reify and Redact: Still More Selections

After a short deviation to write about my efforts in PopPhoto’s 2007 Shootout, I’ve returned to the Reify and Redact Project. Here are my latest selections.

The honors for most frequent representation in my selected best efforts go to my niece. This B/W shot was made with that same Yashica 12 TLR when the camera was not quite so old. The color shot, an Ektrachrome slide, was made with the Konica T2 just a year or so later and in about the same location on the beach.

The great thing about the Yashica 12 was the large (as compared to 35mm) negative. I could get enlargements from those negatives without having too many dust spots. The difficulty in

using the Yashica was composition and focusing. The ground glass viewer showed a reversed image that gave me a really tough time. For this picture, I was almost certainly using the "sports finder" instead of the screen.

In comparison to the Yashica, using the Konica T2 was easy until the enlarging process in the darkroom. My preferences quickly became the Konica for color slides and the Yashica for B/W.

Reify and Redact: More Selections

The paper and interleave tissue has arrived but the portfolio box was backordered. Those first selections have been printed and a few more selected to be printed.








In 1997, beginning a return to photography, I picked up my old Yashica 12 for a walk around the beach near sunset. The Yashica 12 is a twin lens reflex camera using 120 film (2-1/4 x 2-1/4 inches) – a medium format camera from the 1960s. This child’s bicycle caught my eye and I took a few shots of it against the sunset sky. The prints were terrible but I always thought that there was a good photo in them. A few years later I was able to scan the negative myself, process it in Photoshop and finally got the picture I wanted.







In 1999, while on a Popular Photography Mentor Series workshop on the Mississippi Queen paddlewheeler, I woke early as we approached Natchez. With my 1972 Konica T2, I was able to get this shot. Later that day, I dropped the T2 and it jammed. Fortunately, I was able to borrow a more modern Canon SLR and complete the workshop. I had the T2 repaired but also bought a Canon SLR.