Zakim Bridge

Zakim Bridge
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I've been playing with the 40D for about a week now, and I'll post some more thoughts on using it tomorrow.

Dandelions

Dandelions
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Lamp ablaze

Lamp ablaze
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Quick break from my 40D notes for some Strobism. This oil lamp was lit basically from below with my Vivitar 285HV flash with a Cactus V2 trigger. I put the flash in telephoto mode and dialed down to 1/16th power, and wedged it between the table and the wall, directly behind the lamp.

This got me the exposure and overall effect that I wanted, but I still needed to shape the light a bit. I took a few small business and index cards and made them into really tiny barndoors -- if you could see through the lamp, you would see them behind the oil-filled bottom section -- and this shaped the light along the upper section quite well. To keep the edge of the table and bottom of the lamp clean, I took small scraps of paper and placed them directly on the flash head as small gobos, really just a half inch long on either side.

I also tried using a full CTO gel over the barndoor index cards to color the upper section's light, but ultimately had problems keeping everything tucked away without having to shoot at a really funky angle. That color looked great though, and it's definitely a technique I'll use in the future -- directing the flash output in different areas with different coloring.

These simple elements took some minor tweaking and adjusting, poking things with pens and whatnot to get them in the right place, but it's amazing what you can do with the contents of a desk drawer.

Mayhem

Mayhem
Originally uploaded by mehampson

My goal in playing around this afternoon was to get a sense of how the 40D works and handles in comparison to the XT. Given the age of both models, I doubt many people will be reading this looking for a direct comparison of the two, but my general impressions of moving from an entry-level class DSLR to a prosumer model may still be useful.

This shot is my first real keeper with the 40D. I set it up more or less as a macro: 100mm USM macro lens, tripod mounted with a radio-triggered off-camera flash, gelled for sunlight since I was near a window.

I could have easily swapped the Rebel XT for the 40D and done an image-by-image comparison, and I may still do that later, but I was really more interested in how the 40D affected my workflow than in the absolute image quality. Unless the 40D or the photographer is defective, it will always take as good or slightly better images than the XT, with a bit more detail and resolution simply because of the better sensor and processor. It's behind the current crop of xxxD cameras in some regards -- but the image quality of the XT wasn't what I felt needed improvement.

With the Rebel XT, my old camera, I would have eyeballed the focus on the, err, eye of the cat, and then chimped the lighting until I found a power and angle combination that I liked. Typically I would take about a dozen shots. The exposure would have been difficult to really nail without overexposing the white fur, and I probably would have ended getting it 'close enough' out of camera, and then doing local adjustments in post-processing.

In comparison, the 40D made this shot simpler in a few ways. After composing the image -- which is much easier in the 40D's larger, clearer viewfinder, by the way -- I switched on the Live View and magnified to 10x, which let me manually focus on the eye with razor-sharp precision. I got the angle on the light in one, and the power level I wanted on the third shot.

Actually, I got the power level on like the fifth, after I noticed I was shooting at ISO 800. The 40D does show the ISO in the viewfinder and on the LCD display, but I wasn't paying close attention to those. Durr.

The dynamic range of the 40D is great, and I had enabled Highlight Tone Priority, a custom function that preserves detail in the brightest highlights. Without any major tweaking to the RAW image, both the white and dark patches of fur are clean and detailed. I know I'm not deliberately comparing the image quality of the two cameras here, but when I opened the RAW file, basically the first from this camera, my expectations were based on what I've seen the past year from the XT -- and I was impressed.

This was a pretty straightforward shot, not one where I'd have spent a lot of time getting the most compelling angle and interesting lighting. Even so, I felt much more efficient using the 40D than with the XT. I got an image that I liked with less monkeying around, and it was better than I'd expected based on my experience with the XT. The weight and placements of the controls will take some getting used to -- weather permitting, I'll take it on a photo walk tomorrow and we'll see how it goes.