see the rest on flickr

A friend pointed out to me that Canon is running its double rebate deal for the year. I’m not particularly in the market for anything, but I took a look out of curiousity. For the most part, it’s chump change; thirty bucks off a $380 flash is hardly worth the paper work. However, that rebate on the 5D is a sizeable $300. Double it by buying a lens, like a 50 f.14, and you get $600 rebate on the body and a $40 rebate on the lens. With the 5D currently selling for $2800 and the fifty for $315, the rebates can get you both for less than $2500, with shipping! Yeah, yeah, the 5D is still really just a $400-$500 camera with a $2000 digital supplement, but $2500 for the body and a lens that won’t suck is pretty spiffy in the digital realm.

If I read the right forums, I bet I could find a number of people wondering if these rebates mean that Canon is clearing out stock in anticipation of releasing a 6D this winter. Note that even though the 5D is only twice the price of a 30D , the 5D gets triple the rebate of the 30D. Perhaps a 40D is not imminent. Perhaps Canon has got a $2000 6D waiting in the wings. Perhaps.

Surely Canon must refresh the 30D this winter if they don’t want sales of the 10MP Rebel to kill off their mid-level DSLR. Or maybe they are abandoning the cropped frame mid-level DSLR market. Perhaps they think the new Rebel has got this market just about wrapped up. They may be right about that. The new Rebel looks pretty capable. It’s buffer is almost as big as the 30D’s - take into account the 400D’s larger files size, and its buffer may actually be bigger in MB than the 30D’s. The AF and metering systems look to be the same, although the 400D doesn’t get a spot meter. The 400D gets Kelvin WB settings, which the 30D doesn’t have. You do get significantly more info in the VF with the 30D.

It doesn’t seem like Canon has left a lot out of the 400D. Apart from the added VF info and a spot meter, I’m not sure what the alleged 40D would have to offer. Maybe a real mirror lock up? Canon users always seem bent up on that issue. What could they add to a 40D that would justify spending $500 more on it? Nothing.

Which brings us back around to my orignial point. The 40D is dead in the water. Canon thinks they can wrap up the midlevel with the 400D. The 6D willl target more apsirational users with a price point probably under two grand and some minimal updates to the 5D’s feature set. I’m betting it gets some sensor tweaks and a higher frame rate. If they pull it off, expect to see prices on the D200 drop to $1300.

There’ve been a lot of questions on photo.net the last few days regarding the B&W capabilities of the D80. Although the general consensus seems to be that real men shoot RAW, that seems to me a little too much like the digital hairshirt equivalent of using stainless steel reels in changing bag. I’m not convinced of the general superiority of RAW, and I’d rather get it right in camera, which preference has nothing doing with a luddite tendency, but rather is mostly an outgrowth of laziness and impatience on my part. I’d rather not process raw files on a laptop. A demonstration of the filtering effects follows:


B&W mode, no filter applied

B&W mode, green filter applied

B&W mode, orange filter applied

B&W mode, red filter applied

B&W mode, yellow filter applied

There’s also a contrast adjustment to be played with, and over the next few days I’m going to be looking at using a custom curve in camera.

First, don’t be mislead by the post title. Zinio is by no means an unsung great, although it might well be unsung, this post not withstanding. Convolutions aside, what’s Zinio? It’s a way to get magazines online. I stumbled on it while living in Korea. As a way of getting magazines that would have been prohibitively expensive over there - like $25 an issue - Zinio seemed to fill a real need. So I spent the $6 to get a year’s subscription to American Photo. AP is not a particularly distinguished periodical, but it’s entertaining, and a guy can only read so many issues of the Joong Ang Daily. You pay your money, you install a reader, it goes and downloads your content. The content is something like a PDF, I think. Text is clear and readable. Photos are about what you get on the web, although they are a little small for the most part. They even go to the trouble of putting in those subscription cards everyone tears out of the magazine; unfortunately, the reader software doesn’t include a way of tearing them out. Maybe for version 4.

On to unsung greats. This month’s issue of AP features a number of unsung great photographers. It’s an interesting read, and look. I recognized a number of the photos, although I didn’t at first recognize any of the names, until I got to Leslie Krims AKA Les Krims. If you don’t know Krims’ work, do yourself a favor. Stop reading this. Turn on your speakers. Go to Krims’ site: http://www.leskrims.com.

Are you back yet? Good. Leave Krim’s site running in another tab. That music is catchy. While you listen, check out another unsung great, William Gedney. A thread on photo.net a couple of months back got me onto Gedney, and Alec Soth recently mentioned Gedney in a blog post. So perhaps he isn’t that unsung. Great none the less. Check out Duke’s Gedney archives: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/gedney/. Gedney strikes me as easily the equal to Frank, Cartier-Breson and Winogrand.

Know any other unsung greats? Leave a comment.

I haven’t been in a real darkroom in more than 10 years. Lack of darkroom facilities was a leading factor in the long vacation I took from photography. A couple of years ago I bought a changing bag; bathrooms have been my darkrooms ever since. I’m on my 5th bathroom/darkroom, and I’ll probably have another in next few months. Here’s a couple of things I’ve learned along the way:

1. Liquid chemistry is your friend. When you have no permanent facilties for mixing up large batches of powder - which are the only size powder batches worth mixing - you learn that saving a few cents buying powders isn’t really worth it.
2. Under the heading of every rule has its exceptions, Diafine is the easiest developer to use under adverse conditions. It deserves a place in every darkroom/bathroom.
3. It’s often easier to bring chemicals up to a higher temperature than it is to lower their temp down. Even in an apartment only a few degrees above freezing, a pan of hot tap water can bring all your chemistry up to 75 degrees pretty quickly.
4. There’s no such thing as a too big changing bag. Buy the biggest you can find.
5. Nalgene bottles are convenient for storage and mixing.
6. Pyrex measuring cups are also great for measuring and mixng. Just make sure you don’t use the same one for making cookies.
7. Dust and crummy water are your enemies. Hang your negs in the shower or other enclosed place. Develop and wash with distilled or bottled water. The cheap bottled water seems to work the best.
8. Rubbing alcohol is almost a good a surfactant as PhotoFlo, and it nevers leaves a residue on your negs.
9. With a roll of gaffers tape you can rig up a way to hang negs just about anywhere. Unlike duct tape, gaffers tape won’t pull the paint off your walls.
10. One of those pocket knives with a scissors and a bottle opener on opposite ends of the knife makes a really nice tool for cracking cannisters and cutting negs.
11. Real men use stainless steel reels, but the rest of use plastic autoloading reels. Loading stainless steel reels in a rubberized bag in 95 degree heat is a special kind of hell to be avoided at all costs.

I keep telling myself that I’m going to come up with a cool way to pack up all my darkroom kit into something self-contained. Maybe a pelican case or an old hard sided suitcase. Ideally the scanner would fit in their as well. Maybe for darkroom/bathroom version 7.


fresh from the basement bathroom, just hours ago