Niklas Saers' blog

There’s a spoiler available for Star Wars: Episode 3. Some guy has collected a lot of images and made a storyboard out of it. (via Boing Boing)

Me and Mogens were looking at wide-angle lenses, which of course brings me on to the subject of flashes. What I’ve really wanted to play with is several flashes, for instance a Canon 580ex and two Canon 420ex’es as slaves. But since Canon hasn’t decided to sponsor my blog with these lenses just yet, I started reading up on alternatives.

My first suprise was, the wireless support for these lenses is infra-red. Hello, radio has been around for a loooong time! Do you think I’ll have those extra flashes put in a place where they can have “eye-contact”? So, looks like I’ll be waiting for a new series of flashes.

But, I found it interesting that the Sigma EF-500 DG works just like the 580ex, people have been really pleased about it and it’s just half the price of the Canon. Alas, the Sigma seems to get a thumbs down from one wedding photographer (Ben Rubenstein). (the other reviews were good, but way shorter) The EF-500 was Sigma’s answer to Canon’s 550ex, guess we’ll see what they’ll match the 580ex with. While we’re waiting, read the EF-500 review and the 580ex review.

New to flash photography with Canon camera’s? Read this introduction. It’s a bit long, but it has all that you want

Well, to summarize the lens issue: I might be selling my EF-S 18-55mm and only use my EF 28-80mm and use 0.42x fisheye lens I was conned into buying. Or, I’ll continue, as now, to use my 18-55mm for fisheye only. The options we read up on were EF-S 10-22mm (samples)/(forum reviews) that would suit me very well (that is, if I started doing landscape photography and such. Right now, my use for this lens would probably be quite limited), but the EF 17-40mm has got really good critiques in different forums as well, even though the 10-22mm forum sais to stay away from the 17-40mm if the 10-22mm is an option. My main critique of the 10-22mm is that 10mm looks very fish-eye’ish. For fisheye, I think the Peleng 9mm featured on Chromasia seems spectacular. But for now I’ll keep toying with my EF-S 18-55mm and the 0.42x fisheye.

I’ve been using iPhoto lately, and I’ve been using it a lot.

First to the RAW issue. Does Apple make use of RAW? Yes and no. When at first you load the RAW, the changes you make will use the RAW file as source and apply them, not wasting your precious data. However, it will save the changed file as a JPEG. Thus, next time you make a change, iPhoto will NOT use your RAW file, apply the changes you did before and the ones you have made now and save that as a file, but it will use your intermediate JPEG file, thus wasting more information than necessary. This is most apparent when you use external programs. Try dragging your fresh file to an application, and it will be served a RAW file. Make some changes in iPhoto, and it will be served a JPEG. Can this be solved? Yes, it’s quite easy for Apple to save a trail of what modifications have been done to the image as metadata to the image and apply these when making changes later. It will take a bit longer to save the file, but that will defintely be worth it.

Second, not being able to select a whitepoint is a hassle. For the pictures you’re not passionate about, this is not a problem, but to the ones you want to give your best attention, iPhoto will not be what you’re using. Selecting a whitepoint is so quickly done in other programs

But iPhoto 5 is WAY faster than iPhoto 2. I’ve been hitting it with my 30mb/photo negative scans (the Nikon Super coolscan 4000ED is doing a great job backing up my fathers negatives), rotating and cropping away. I’ve been touring Denmark with this years Very Big Band project, taking 4gb worth of photos with my Canon EOS 20D, organizing the lot and putting it together with iDVD. (The iPhoto/iDVD combination does not work super as there is no other way than manual to change the sort order of the iPhoto pictures when importing them to in iDVD. And once it’s cached a iPhoto folder, resorting the folder in iPhoto won’t help either) Sorting, rotating, simple editing and organizing the photos and burning them to a DVD (iPhoto format) is easy, if you don’t mind waiting 5 seconds now, 10 seconds after the next edit and 5 seconds to create a folder.

Bugs? Yes sir, the progress window will keep open forever when I’ve been editing files, and the program will often go into what looks like an endless while when it’s not used, leaving “force quit” as the only option. Doing too many things at once seems to confuse the editor and make it do only a few of the changes that were asked for.

So is it worth the upgrade? For me I’d say a definitive yes. I’m more organized with my photos as iPhoto 5 can handle more pictures quicker than iPhoto 2 could. Is there room for improvement? Yes, very much. Hope Apple will release upgrades beyond the 5.01 upgrade, which I believe they did not for iPhoto 4.