Excellent galleries Randy. I came across your site while googling Lake Bemidji. I especially like the boat pictures. Does Lee Anderson bring his boats to that show? He owns A & L properties, and has an extensive boat collection. I saw a calendar he had made of just his boats before. Hope all is well with you and family. Take care, Happy Hilidays, and see you next summer!
Thanks for visiting my pbase site. I checked out your woodyboater.com site. very impressive, lots of good info there. You have permission to use any of my classic boat photos on your site. I should be adding a few more by the end of the month.
best of luck with your site, I'll be a regular visitor.
Russ,
Thank you for your comments. I am sorry to hear that you are having problems with your 20D. I have had very good luck with all my Canon cameras. My first DSLR was the 10D. I took about 10,000 photos with that camera, really liked it, but realized that it had a lot of things I would like to see improved. Along the line I bought a Canon S500 so that I would have a pocket sized camera. I have been very happy with that camera too. When I heard about the 20D, it seemed like the new camera addressed everything I felt was wrong with the 10D except that I hoped it would have a larger LCD monitor. I ordered the 20D within hours of it's showing up on the Ritz Camera site, received it 5 weeks later, and never looked back. It's a great camera. Love the speed.
I have included 4 jpg shots. I seldom shoot raw unless I know I will need to make major adjustments to the lighting later. raw is great when you are unsure of the lighting like in a stadium or auditorium. You can set the white balance later. It is also nice when you think you may need to make large adjustments to color, or levels later because of difficult lighting situations. Bottom line, I only use raw in bad circumstances, It helps me salvage a photo that would have been worthless otherwise.
The attached photos are all very sharp. You can blow them up to 100% and 150% to see a lot of detail. All my shots are not this sharp, (I wish they were) but this shows the capabilities of the camera and the lens when everything works right. These shots were also taken at large standard quality not fine quality.
I'll go through the photos lens by lens and make comments.
The shot of the girls and the cat were taken with my EF-S 17-85 IS lens. This lens is a pretty good walk-about lens for the 20 D. On the plus side, it has a very nice range of focal lengths, focuses fast and quietly, has good macro capabilities, is fairly sharp and has good color. Negatives: fairly large and heavy, barrel distortion at the wide end, pincushion at the long end. (best images are in the 24-75mm range) Image stabilization works well in low light when you need exposures longer than 1/30 second, but turn it off for everything else. When I first got the lens, I had it on all the time and it ruined a lot of my shots. I could not figure out what was going on for the longest time. Shots were blurred that looking at the f-stop and speed should have been perfect. My theory is that it takes the IS motors a while to wind up. If you click off a fast shot before they wind up, the IS lenses may be moving erratically. When you are taking a shot in low light with the IS on, hold the camera steady, prefocus and turn on the IS by half depressing the shutter release, hold steady for almost a second to let everything wind up and steady down, take the shot. When you do that, you can get some really useful shots at about 1/10 second or slower. The rest of the time, Turn the IS off.
The shot of the two people in the bar was taken with my old 24-85 Canon lens. I include it not because it is a great shot, but because it really shows how sharp this very underrated lens is. This lens also does not have any barrel or pincushion distortion which the 17-85 lens suffers from. I am going to sell the 24-85mm lens on E-bay and will be lucky to get $150.00 for it, but I always liked this lens. It is small and works well, but the 17-85 is just so handy that I never use the older lens anymore.
The buffalo was taken with my new 100-400 L lens. It is my first L glass. It will not be my last. The lens is very sharp for a zoom, focuses fast and takes really nice photos. It's too bad that the L zooms always have a small zoom ratio and are usually so much larger than standard lenses. I guess that is the price you pay if you want perfect images. I have used other L glass owned by friends, It's sure easy to get spoiled. Same thing goes with the IS here. If it is a bright day and your shutter speed it 1/1000 second. Turn it off. It can do more harm than good.
One other note, for Parameters, I have been using Contrast -1, Sharpness 0, Saturation +1. tone 0. The 20 D does not have a good sharpening algorithm (it uses the same as the Canon point and shoot cameras, not the pro cameras) Do your sharpening in photoshop or Canon Photo Professional. Use -1or -2 for contrast. you will get a lot more dynamic range. A sunset shot for example will have very underexposed foreground areas and very over exposed sky areas. Setting contrast at -2 will give you much better results. For your other shots, it is easy to bring up the contrast later with the levels tool.
