Sunflowers, northeast Colorado. Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty. Jr.

I am on the road. Photos are here.

It was rumored, now it’s official. The new Canon 20D looks like an impressive successor to the 10D. The sensor is 8 megapixels. It still has the same 1.6x field of view crop as the 10D. I was hoping for a bigger sensor so my wide angle lenses would give me a wider field of view than on the 10D.

Start up time is much faster, it shoots at a maximum of 5 frames per second vesus 3 fps on the 10D, and it has a bigger buffer.

DP Review has an excellent 11 page preview here.

When you refer to your computer mouse, you probably aren’t thinking about a living, four-legged, furry critter. My son went to do some work on his computer one evening and found a very young and small mouse happily sprawled out and warming itself on a power block plugged into a power strip. My son and daughter-in-law decided the mouse was too young and cute to kill, so they captured it and turned it loose at the back of their yard. He went back to work at the computer.

Early the next morning, he again headed downstairs to the computer and there was the same mouse, back in the house and warming itself again on the same power block. (Notice the ignored mouse trap, baited with peanut butter.) Once again, the persistent mouse was captured. This time it was taken for a car ride and turned loose at a city park.

And what happens in the unlikey event the mouse finds its way back again? It will be deemed worthy of a proper home and they will keep it.

SEQUEL – August 14

A day after posting the above, I received the following photo and note from my brother-in-law.

“Ours wasn’t so lucky.”

The Perseid metor shower goes on all month, but peaks the evening of August 11-12. It is usually better after midnight. Look high in the northeastern skys about 45 degrees above the horizon.

click the page links to the right to continue

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson died Tuesday at the age of 95. He was one of the foremost photographers of the 20th century.

click the page links to the right to continue and see several of his classic photographs

Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty. Jr.

I am at SPECTACULAR at Graceland University this week, better known by its short name: SPEC.

click the page links to the right to continue

Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty. Jr.

I stopped by the road in northern Ohio to photograph a combine. To my surpise, I was invited to go along for the ride. The story is here.

For photographer’s with Canon EF lenses who want a digital camera with a full frame sensor, the new Kodak camera is one answer that costs $3,000 less than the Canon EOS 1Ds.

click the page links to the right to continue

Leica Digilux 2 – Panasonic LC1 DC Vario Summicron

Read the review at The Luminous Landscape

THE BIG FIVE:
8 MP DIGICAMS

There are five digicams with 8 megapixel (MP) sensors. If you are looking for a full featured point-and-shoot digital camera, you might be considering one of these. They are so full-featured that point-and-shoot hardly seems like an adequate phrase, but these are all-in-one cameras with a single non-interchangeable zoom lens. Some of them have auxiliary lenses that screw or bayonet on the front of the permanent lens.

I am not tempted to buy one of these cameras, tempting though they are, for three reasons.

click the page links to the right to continue

This morning DP Review posted a complete review of the Canon 1D Mark II, giving it a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED rating, their highest.

This is a remarkable 8 megapixel camera that will shoot at speeds of over 8 frames per second for 40 continuous jpeg frames (20 in RAW mode) before the camera pauses to give the buffer a chance to write to the memory card. Amazing!

click the page links to the right to continue

12GB CF CARD!
HOW MANY CARDS DO YOU NEED?

Just what you need for Christmas, a 12 GB (gigabyte) compact flash card from Pretec. Estimated price in U.S. dollars (drum roll please): $14,900. That’s right, just shy of fifteen thousand dollars. It is supposed to be available by the end of the year, maybe in time to go in your Christmas stocking.

What would you do with such a thing? Stick it in your digital camera and take pictures forever!

Does this make sense? Not for me. Ignoring the sticker shock, I wouldn’t want that many images on one memory card. Too risky.

I use mostly 1 GB flash cards. In a serious shooting situation I might fill one or two cards in a day. At the end of the day I download the card/s to a computer, do a quick preliminary edit, delete the bad shots, and burn the rest to CD-R discs. Only when the files have been burned to disc do I re-format the flash card and use it again (more on the reasons for this some other day).

At a recent conference I aeraged a gigabyte of photos per day for 10 days. You can see some of them in the “World Conference” albums here (scroll down to the 10 albums posted in late March-April, 2004). Every night I would download my card/s, edit, and burn two sets of discs, one for me and another for the conference PR department. I would drop off their disc the next day.

With a 12 gigabyte memory card, I could have captured the whole conference on one card, but it would not have saved me from the nightly download, they wanted pictures every day to post online.

And bad things happen to good memory cards. They can eventually fail, get lost, be physically damaged, dropped down the face of a cliff while you are switching cards while photographing bighorn sheep, stolen, or any one of a number of other mishaps. The loss, damage, or failure of a memory card is just like losing a bunch of rolls of exposed film, the bigger the card, the more pictures you lose.

I have not had a lost, damaged, stolen, or failed memory card yet, but I know it will happen some day. For me, the choice is a compromise between the convenience of carrying less cards and the risk of what happens if a card is lost or damaged and the images unrecoverable.

In Colorado last fall, I filled a 1 GB card with photos almost every day. If something happened to one of my cards, I would have lost a a day’s worth of photos. That would be truly sad. If I used a 12 GB card and lost it, I would lose a whole weeks worth of photos. If it was a great week, that would be truly awful (at least in photographic terms).

I went on the trip of a lifetime to Alaska and photographed the whole venture on film. If I had been using my current digital camera I could have shot the same number of photos on one 12 GB flash card with room left over. It would be simple and save lots of space, but what if something happened to that card?

I can think of one good use for a card that big, in a USB card reader you could carry around a collection of your most treasured files, ready to plug into any computer anywhere.

Then again, for $14,900, you could buy a laptop for your treasured files, or several laptops, or a car to carry your laptop, or lots of camera gear, or several trips to Alaska, or . . .

Happy Safe Shooting!

“June 3, 2004 (TOKYO) — Pentax Corp plans to introduce this fall a SLR (single-lens reflex) digital camera aimed at general consumers that will retail for a little more than 100,000 yen.

Pentax began selling higher-end SLR digital cameras last September that retailed for around 190,000 yen, and it is now looking to expand demand by reaching out to ordinary consumers. The firm aims to raise the consolidated sales from its digital camera business by about 40% to 70 billion yen in fiscal 2004.”

Original article is here.

Assuming this is a good quality camera body, this is good news for people with Pentax lenses that want to go digital for less than $1,000.

Photo (c) Robert Capa. Taken June 6, 1944.

See my June 6, 2004 post here

I am deeply moved by the photos of U.S. war dead returning from Iraq. They speak of sacrifice, loyalty, patriotism, commitment, sorrow, and the high price of war.

I posted one photo with some information about the photographer, Tami Silicio, and the story behind the photo in my May 16 post “ON THE WAY HOME” (see below). If you missed that post, you can read more here and here. Tami Silicio took the photos because she believed the families of the fallen soldiers would be comforted to see how much respect and care were shown to the remains of their loved ones. The photographer has a brief web page here.

Whatever your views on the situation in Iraq, the photos are worth looking at. I have not posted these photos as a protest. (Personally, I believe we should be in Irag but I don’t we believe we have made all of the right policy decisions about what we are doing there.)

If you want to see a complete set of photos, the Memory Hole has posted several albums of photos of flag-draped caskets arriving at Dover AFB. Due to very heavy internet traffic, several other sites have mirrored the photos, including this one.

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia came apart over Texas. Photos taken of the flag-draped caskets of the Columbia astronauts arriving at Dover AFB have been mis-identified in the press as U.S. casualties from the war in Iraq.

*** *** ***

NASA’s press release:

“April 23, 2004
Bob Jacobs
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-1600)

NOTE TO EDITORS: n04-059

COLUMBIA CREW MISTAKENLY IDENTIFIED AS IRAQI WAR CASUALTIES

Many news organizations across the country are mistakenly identifying the flag-draped caskets of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s crew as those of war casualties from Iraq.

Editors are being asked to confirm that the images used in news reports are in fact those of American casualties and not those of the NASA astronauts who were killed Feb.1, 2003, in the Columbia tragedy.

An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia’s seven astronauts.

News organizations across the world have been publishing and distributing images featured on the web site.

-end-“

*** *** ***

The complete set of Columbia astronaut photos from Dover AFB is here.

Due to very heavy internet traffic, the photos are also mirrored here.

Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty. Jr.

This marmalade hoverfly was photographed with a Canon 1X-5X macro lens. More here.

Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

How I missed this tongue in cheek article, I don’t know. Be forewarned, the writer must have overdosed on 1950’s grade-B gangster movies.

Read Mike Johnston’s humorous take on how camera companies supposedly bribe reviewers.

Personally, I found the bribe from the OM bunch the most poignant. The Konica-Minolta bribe would be the most useful.

The Sony bribe?
As they say in the movies, “Fugedaboudit!”

Photo copyright 2004 Tami Silicio

“Flag-draped coffins are secured inside a cargo plane on April 7 at Kuwait International Airport. Military and civilian crews take great care with the remains of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. Soldiers form an honor guard and say a prayer as, almost nightly, coffins are loaded for the trip home.” The Seattle Times

Taking this photo cost Tami her job. The story is here and here.

PHOTO OF THE DAY – JALYN

Photo copyright (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

This photo is a digital solarization. It began as a color slide, was scanned and turned into a black and white photo (Grayscale), and then recolorized (RGB mode) as a digital version of the wet darkroom technique of solarization. To learn how this was done, go here.

Andrea, Rock Climbing, Final Fling, Saturday, May 8, 2004, Photo (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

On the Saturday before finals week, Graceland University has a day of fun activities called Final Fling. Rock climbing, mud volleyball, big glove boxing, a 3D obstacle course, and the velcro wall are just a few of the activities of the day.

Final Fling, Photo (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

More Final Fling photos are in the album posted here. All of my currently posted albums are here and my primary website is here.

Final Fling, Photo (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

Bridget, World Conference. Photo (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

This is one of the most popular photos from albums posted during World Conference, measured in terms of the number of visitors that clicked on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the photo. Bridget is my niece.

I snapped the photo below during a break in the activities. Rachel was my photographer’s assistant for the week.

Rachel, World Conference. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.

More conference photos are in the 10 albums posted here.

Digital Photo from SPECTACULAR 2003, copyright (c) Jim Doty, Jr.

Charlotte K. Lowrie: Two weeks ago, I walked into my office, raised the lid of my laptop, and was greeted with a one-line error message: “Can’t read from drive C:.” This was far too simple a message for such a total failure. I looked at the screen expecting solicitous condolences or maybe an apology. None were forthcoming. . . .

Ah, the perils of storing digital photos. Lowrie provides a perspective on the issue that I raised in my April 26 post (see below or in the Archives for April). She has opted for external hard drives to backup up digital photos. I prefer to use external hard drives AND high quality CD-R discs.

Read Lowrie’s article here.

Photo (c) M. Plonsky

What kind of closeups can you take with Canon G1 and G3 point and shoot digital cameras? The insect photos at M. Plonsky’s website are a good example. The site has a one page tutorial on macro photography with the G1 and G3. You can see more of Plonsky’s work in the galleries posted at PBase.

If you want to do closeup photography with an SLR, I have an article here.

Photo (c) M. Plonsky

At last! Yesterday I wanted full reviews of 8 megapixel digicams at DP review. This morning they are up at at DP Review.

Here is a quick summary of the conclusions:

Olympus C-8080 – Highly Recommended
Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 – Recommended
Canon PowerShot Pro1 – Recommended
Nikon Coolpix 8700 – Recommended
Sony Cybershot DSC-F828 – Recommended

Highly Recommended is the top rating, followed by Recommended, Above Average, Average, and Below Avergage. I recommend picking a digital camera that receives a “Recommended” or “Highly Recommended” rating from DP Review.

These results are both surprising and disappointing. I must say that none of these cameras has all the features I want in an 8 megapixel camera. What I want already exists, just in 2 or 3 different cameras. What do I want? High image quality, 28-200 mm lens (35 mm equivalent), image stabilization, fast lens apertures, a buffer for raw files (no waiting to take 3 or 4 photos in fast succession), manual lens zooming, convenient manual focus, good close up ability, touch the shutter to go instantly back to shooting mode from any other mode, and intuitive controls. Maybe the next generation of 8 megapixel digicams will have everything, or almost everything in one camera.

Are these bad cameras? No, they are very good cameras. It is just that I have a good digicam already and none of these has the right combinations of features to compel me to upgrade.

But that shouldn’t stop you. One of these cameras may be just what you want. Read the reviews linked below and decide for yourself.

Image quaility from all these cameras is good, with some image attribute variations from camera to camera.

Image Quality Comparison Chart (c) DP Review

To recap my comments from yesterday, Reichmann likes these cameras in this order: The Minolta and Sony are his favorites with the Minolta edging out the Sony. The Canon is his middle of the road pick. The Olympus and Nikon are at the bottom of Reichmann’s list. It will be interesting to compare reviews.

Here are links for reviews at both sites:

DP Review: Olympus C-8080
Luminous Landscape: Olympus C-8080

DP Review: Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2
Luminous Landscape: Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2

DP Review: Canon PowerShot Pro1
Luminous Landscape: Canon PowerShot Pro1

DP Review: Nikon Coolpix 8700
Luminous Landscape: Nikon Coolpix 8700 Non-Review

DP Review: Sony Cybershot DSC-F828
Luminous Landscape: Sony Cybershot DSC-F828

Michael Reichmann has reviewed (or in one case almost reviewed) the 8 megapixel digicams from Minolta, Sony, Canon, Olympus and Nikon. So which did he like best? Go back and read the prior list in order.

He prefers the Minolta and Sony as the best in the group, places the Canon in the middle, and finds the Olympus and Nikon disappointing. Why? Read his comparisons of the group, as well as the individual reviews (linked from the top of his article). Reichmann is not the final answer – nor does he claim to be – but his opinions are well worth considering.

I am anxiously awaiting the appearance of full reviews from DP Review.

Victim of a Belfast girl gang. Photo copyright Thomas McMullan.

This photo is featured among the highest rated at the Photosig photo sharing site. Some stunning work is posted at this site and it is worth looking at from time to time.

Windmill near Schermerhorn. Photo copyright Jaap Hart.