Hey everyone! Well, I have been very quiet this past week and thought I'd give you an update...
I took delivery of my *istD on Thursday 12 Feb - just over a week ago. It took me that afternoon of shooting with it before I felt totally comfortable with it. My initial misgiving with the camera was with the shutter speed dial which I found to be too close to the on/off switch and found myself turning the camera on and off all the time when trying to adjust the shutter speed. After a fair bit of shooting however, I have become used to it and find it great ergonomics. I LOVE the placement of the DOF switch - it is so easy to use! I LOVE the ease of switching between WB, ISO and capture modes. I LOVE the ease of switching between drive and flash modes. I LOVE the "green" button hyper function in manual mode, and also the green button AEL - that is a very cool function that I've never seen before. The autobracketing and multiple exposure is easy to use. It is easy to preview your images with a simple push of the play button, and likewise with viewing info for each image. Most of all, and probably most importantly, the BEST feature of this camera (to me anyways) are the ease of switching between spot, centre and matrix metering and I used this function CONSTANTLY when shooting with the kids on location this week (due to differing light situations and the fact that I needed the colours to be rendered accurately for the clothing garments). AND just as easy and almost as important is the ability to switch between auto, selective and central AF points - LOVE this! ALSO the superimposed little red square that indicates the selected AF point to be used. There are many things that I have come to love about this camera over the past week, and do not regret my purchase at all. I do agree with Rob Studdert about the ease of deleting your entire memory card and have almost done this a number of times myself, and have also adopted Rob's strategy of never deleting in field to accomodate this. I also agree that removal of the CF card sucks, even with my tiny little fingers. I will be growing my fingernails slightly to counteract this! lol... I shot a wedding on the Saturday (two days after I received the *istD), and have done two portrait sittins, as well as two separate location shoots for the Kids Clothing catalogue client that I've been working with. I am LOVING being able to use all of my lenses. I had a major (well, minor really, but it generated alot more work for myself) catastrophe, when I arrived home after the first location shoot with the kids to discover that I'd had it set on manual white balance (rather than AUTO) the entire time - during which, I had shot in open shade, backlit situations, with full flash, with high speed flash, at sunset, with flash as daylight fill as well as a variety of other situations, and never having manually set the WB at all! This resulted in images with some pretty funky colour casts and lots of PS'ing on my behalf, but the following day, I set it back to Auto White Balance and the results were fine on the next shoot. Here are some examples of the weirdo colour results that I got (AFTER colour correction! *eek*) - pink clouds, aqua skies, and some SCARY skin tones!: http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0060.html http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0056.html http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0052.html http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0071.html Check out the sky in this one! And this is straight from the camera! WILD stuff, lol!! http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0079.html Surprisingly enough though, my client LOVED the results, and is in fact using many of these "weirded out" shots on her website! Hope it looks ok though and doesn't reflect too poorly on me as a photographer! I have a couple of other grievances with the body that I am not sure are due to my inexperience with it or if they are manufacturing "let downs" - a) I have found that the preview shown on the LCD screen is not accurate and many shots that appear to be correctly exposed on previewing them are actually underexposed when I get them home. Likewise, those that appear to be overexposed or blownout are actually fine when I open them in PS. I am not sure if this is due to the brightness setting on the LCD or if it actually shows the image inaccurately, but even so, I am not relying on the LCD as a true "preview" of what the final image will look like. b) Despite being set at ISO 400, I am having MAJOR exposure problems (both under and over)using the AF360fgz. This is a huge problem for me as one of the things I was excited about in purchasing the *istD was to have full TTL capabilities for flash exposure with it. Instead, I found that I needed to use the flash manually at all times to achieve the exposure that I needed for fill flash and slow sync flash etc when shooting the kids clothing. c) It sucks that you can only use the high speed sync in P-TTL mode. If it was accurately outputting the flash in TTL mode, this wouldn't be a problem, but I am finding that I have to use it manually so can only sync up to 1/150th. d) Too much noise on flat areas, even at ISO 400, using speeds no slower than 1/8th (however, admittedly, I forgot to turn the NR on). I have been shooting with saturation and contrast levels reduced to preserve detail and then pumping them up in PS when I have needed to. The issue about images being soft hasn't affected me one bit, and I have been shooting with the sharpness set on normal. I find that for portraiture type stuff and fashion, such as the work that I do, it renders nice, flattering features on faces. Here is a couple of examples of this: http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0134.html http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0134.html http://www.tanyamayer.com/RunnamuckLocation/pages/Location0137.html I also have a couple of questions - a) With the exposure compensation on the *istD, if I am using it with the AF360FGZ, how does it differ to the exposure compensation on the flash gun itself? Or is it exactly the same thing? b) In regards to the focal length multiplication thingy - it appears to me that when I look through a 50mm lens with the *istD, the subject does indeed look closer than if I look through the same lens on my MZ-6. Ryan seems to think that this shouldn't be the case and that it should simply be that it is a cropped version of what I see in the MZ-6 - I know that there has been discussions about this in the past, but I didn't see them, so I was just wondering what the general concensus of this is? c) I haven't shot in RAW as yet, as I have only just got the plug-in set up etc (and I haven't even bothered to install the Photo Lab software, I'd prefer to just stick with PS and Irfanview). BUT, I noticed that the files are HUGMUNGO (and TIFFS are even bigger) and with 512mb cards I can only fit 30 or so images on the card!! I was wanting to stay with 512mb cards just to get around the possibility of losing too many images should a card fail, but with only 30 or so images per card - this is totally impractical when shooting weddings etc. Just wondering what other wedding photographers are using? I saw that yesterday someone began to discuss this, claiming that most "Pros" shoot with JPEGs at their lowest compression. Wondering what kind of difference this makes in comparison to RAW, quality wise? I would need to be carrying around 8-10 512mb cards just for one wedding if I were to shoot RAW, or at least 5 and have to download images to my laptop a few times during the course of the day. On a practical level both of these options are a pain in the arse and it would suit me much better to just shoot JPG Large, if I could do it and preserve the quality that I need... Ok, so I think that is all that I really have to contribute to the whole *istD debate right now. Just had a FAJ 18-35mm lens delivered, courtesy of Bill Robb yesterday, so I will have a play and be sure to post the results! tan.
