Some 60D Samples

The weather around here has been really nasty lately. Daytime highs have been in the 40's with wind and rain. So while I've carried the 60D around with me I haven't been shooting much with it. Here are some from the past week or so.

Some of these are HDR processed and the exposure information, as usual, is for the normally exposed image.

Waterford Harbor
Canon EOS 60D, EF 17-40mm f/4L USM at 17mm, f/6.7, 1/750 sec., ISO 200

Erie Lock 2 (L) and old Champlain Canal Bypass (R)
Canon EOS 60D, EF 17-40mm f/4L USM at 17mm, f/6.7, 1/250 sec., ISO 200

Mohawk River Dam from Peebles Island
Canon EOS 60D, EF 17-40mm f/4L USM at 36mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec., ISO 100

Canon EOS 60D, EF 300mm f/4L IS USM, f/5.6, 1/500 sec., ISO 400

Welcome To My Bag

I've posted about my search for a more compact solution to my Canon EOS 7D and 5D Mark II bodies, both of which I use with vertical battery grips. I finally arrived at a solution, a solution in which cost played a large role.

Why not just take the grip off when you want a smaller body? Well, there's nothing worse than a less than rigid connection between the grip and the body. It can flex and I've read reports of electrical contact being lost between the camera and the batteries when that occurs.

So, I tighten the thumb wheel that attaches grip to the body as tightly as I can, using a rubber jar opener for added grip. The thumb wheels on the grips use plastic gears to mesh with the screw that attaches to the camera's tripod mount. They have been known to break, and yes, I have broken one. Accordingly, I try to minimize the times I remove and reattach the grips.

I decided that, in addition to a small body for carrying around, I wanted a body that would supplement my current compliment of one full frame body and one crop sensor body. The 7D is a dedicated sports and wildlife body and the 5D Mark II is dedicated to landscapes, closeups, portraits and the like.

This new, smaller body could be either a full frame or crop sensor body. I started out considering the SL1, which I've blogged about, or the full frame 6D, which I haven't blogged about. Envisioning this body as a supplement to the other two bodies, not just a small body to be used separately, led me to rule out the SL1 since the features in the Rebel series in general, and that body in particular, simply aren't what I'm used to.

Which led me to a more detailed examination of the EOS 6D, a full frame body a bit downscaled from the 5D series. A person can't read a review of the 6D, however, without there being a reference to the EOS 60D, a body I have never had any interest in owning.

While I wouldn't desire a 60D as my primary camera -  it really doesn't excel at any one type of photography as do the 7D and 5D Mark II - I gained an appreciation of how it might fit in the role I was trying to fill. Upon looking up some pricing I saw that Canon had a $200 instant rebate on the 60D,  a 22% discount. Also, some retailers were discounting their bodies refurbished by Canon by a similar amount.

So, I ordered a refurbished EOS 60D from Adorama for $579 minus my 2% affiliate discount. This is almost $100 cheaper than the SL1 body for a more advanced camera. I've had the 60D for a week now and am very happy with my decision. While it's big compared to the tiny SL1 it's small compared to my other bodies, even without their grips. Here's a comparison photo taken with my iPhone:

EOS 7D w/50mm f.1.4 - 60D w/40mm f/2.8 - 5DII w/24-70 f/2.8

I'll post some example shots in my next blog entry. Stay tuned.

Little of This, Little of That

I was looking through my shots to see what images might make decent postcards for sale in the Waterford canal area. This was prompted by my post of a couple of weeks ago, on April 29th, which included shots of the Waterford Harbor Visitor's Center, Lock E2 and the old Champlain Canal bypass.

I remembered that I had taken some shots of the Visitor's Center the day after Tropical Storm Irene passed through and raised the Mohawk River well above its banks. You can read my blog post of that day here. I save all my RAW files on a portable hard drive, organized by camera body and month, and went back to the August, 2011, EOS 5D folder to find those original files.

In one of the more recent updates, Canon added an HDR processing tool to it's Digital Photo Professional software. While I usually prefer the results of Photomatix Essentials, the DPP tool will apply HDR type processing to a single file. As I wasn't bracketing exposures when I was shooting the Irene flooding, I decided to try the tool on one of the shots of the Visitor's Center.

Here is the original photo, processed as I was able without the HDR tool:

Canon EOS 5D, EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM at 70mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec., ISO 200

Reducing the brightness would simply take all the texture out of the trees and brightening the shot would blow out the highlights even more. Here is the result of processing with DPP's HDR tool.

Waterford Visitor's Center, Mohawk River, 8/29/11

This would certainly be suitable for a small print like a postcard. This shot was made at 8:52 AM the day after Irene, about 7 hours and 1 foot before the river's crest.

And, continuing with my ongoing evaluation of the 40mm pancake on a 1.6x crop body, here is one additional shot. This is a three image HDR made with an EOS 50D and the pancake lens on a foggy, cloudy morning last week.

Hudson River looking North from the 112th Street Bridge

I will have more on my smaller, 1.6x body setup in the near future.

Trees Spring to Life

It's been a slow transition from brown to green this Spring here in the Northeast. But there's finally some color showing on the trees. Here are some close up shots from yesterday of an ornamental cherry and a maple.

The last one reminds me of a Dr. Seuss illustration.

Canon EOS 7D,  EF 300mm f/4L IS USM, f/8, 1/1000 sec., ISO 200

Canon EOS 5DII,  EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM, f/5.6, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

Canon EOS 7D,  EF 300mm f/4L IS USM, f/8, 1/750 sec., ISO 200

Canon EOS 7D,  EF 300mm f/4L IS USM, f/6.7, 1/1000 sec., ISO 200