Bristol Balloon Fiesta 2013

I never got round to posting photos I took at this years balloon fiesta so here are a few! The weather wasn't kind to me the first day I went so things were a bit dull and overcast and then the second day while the light was beautiful it was too windy for the balloons to launch! Typical!

I'm going to make a few more posts consisting of mainly just photos and then hopefully some more reviews soon. I'm feeling a lot better recently and finding myself able to concentrate on photography related things without negative thoughts creeping into my head as often as they were so with a bit of luck normal service will be restored eventually!

All the fisheye shots were taken with my trusty NEX-5N and Samyang and the others were taken with my 60D and a combination of the Canon 70-300mm L and Sigma 18-50mm EX (the one that front focuses but at least it isn't soft on one side like the countless Canon 17-55s and 15-85s I've tried plus the Sigma 17-50!! STILL haven't found a decent standard zoom!)

a quickr pickr post

HOW MUCH CANON?? (again)

Well it seems Canon believe we are all rich judging by the price of the new mirrorless camera, at $800 it has to be said it's a little steep for an entry level model. Perhaps more disturbing is the 18-55mm kit lens which will weigh in at $300!

These prices are sure to come down in time but even so Canon seem to be going crazy with their prices recently, the MKII version of the 24-70 and the new 28mm and 24mm primes are more examples of this.

First image of the new Canon mirrorless camera and pancake lens!

The first image of Canon's entry into the mirrorless market has been revelaed via the digicame-info website! The camera is named the EOS M and features a new EF-M mount with an APS-C sized sensor. Also shown in the photo is a new 22mm f/2 stm pancake lens!

Update: I see a lot of people are already calling for the public execution of this camera before it is even released! Calm down! This is the very first model and is no doubt intended to have a broad appeal. Obviously it is somewhat simplistic in terms of specs but it is almost inevitable that a more advanced model will be released later on, it looks like a decent enough camera to me, I think it looks neat and minimalist and while it may not be oozing with features you can be sure the image quality will be on a decent level.

My Sony NEX-5N doesn't have a built in viewfinder or a command dial or a built in flash but that doesn't stop it from being one of the best mirrorless cameras on the market and that's thanks in no small part to the astonishingly good image quality.

Only time will tell how good the camera is but knowing Canon it won't be anything less than decent and that lens looks very interesting, take note Sony! There is an official Canon event on monday that could well be the official announcement of this camera and the new system!

Canon unleash the PowerShot G1 X on the world, the world doesn't flinch.

 

Canon has announced the PowerShot G1 X (what is the obsession with "X" at the moment?) and I'm not sure how I feel about it and it seems a lot of you aren't sure either.

It is based around a sensor that is between micro 43 and APS-C in size and the body is a larger version of the design utilized by the most recent G series cameras. It has a fixed lens with a 28-112mm equivalent range (why not 24mm??) and the maximum aperture range varies between a respectable F/2.8 at the wide end a somewhat slow F/5.8 at the long end.

The camera has a basic optical viewfinder, not and EVF or hybrid which is a bit of a disappointment. I have also noticed that the lens doesn't have a filter thread and that you have to fit an adapter before you can use filters, the PowerShot Pro1 used a similar system and it seems Canon haven't learned from past mistakes because just like with the Pro1 you cannot use the filter adapter and the lens hood at the same time because they both use the same fitting to attach to the lens, there must have been a way around this problem!

I think Canon really should have gone for an interchangeable lens model, I'm sure one is in the works but everyone knows they sell well by now so there's no need to test the water with a fixed lens model, it would help if the fixed lens allowed for a very compact camera but it's actually significantly larger than the Panasonic GX1 with the new pancake zoom attached so where's the benefit of having a fixed lens?

I am certain it is a very good camera but the competition is so hot at the moment that this camera seems a little underwhelming, it will be a very good photographic tool for sure but coming from Canon it should be the best of the best and I don't feel like it is.
 

Review: Canon EF-S 55-250mm F/4-5.6 IS

I purchased this lens based on hearing good things said about it, it seemed to offer a lot of ability for the price and was also very small and lightweight making it an ideal for travel or just when you don't want to be weighed down with a bag full of heavy lenses. On paper the lens offers a lot for the money but does it deliver in the real world?

Build quality, finish and operation:

It's not an L lens but it's better made than the kit lens and the 17-85mm lens and even the 17-55mm lens! It feels surprisingly solid with smooth actions and the finish has that mottled effect that Canon is using more often nowadays, it's a small touch but it goes a long way to making the lens look better and feel better in the hand. The zoom ring is nice and big and the lens actually has a decent focus ring too unlike the 18-55mm kit lens which is possibly the worst excuse for a focus ring ever! The lens has a plastic mount but it's a light lens so I have no reason to believe this will cause problems any time soon. For the price I cannot fault the build and finish at all.

The autofocus is pretty quiet for a non USM system and not particularly slow either but accuracy and consistency can be a major issue which I will go into later but I will point out right now that it is this lenses biggest Achilles heel.

The image stabilizer was a brand new design at the time this lens was released and was designed to be cheap to produce but also highly effective and it is certainly that! Canon claim a 4 stop advantage which I'm sure is quite possible if you have steady hands, I have very unsteady hands but I can certainly see a strong advantage with the system activated, another impressive quality for the price.

Image Quality:

Optically this lens is very impressive considering the price, it's unusual for cheap tele zooms to be sharp at the long end especially wide open but thanks to the inclusion a UD glass element this lens manages it and also adds an additional 50mm reach over comparable models, the lens is actually slightly sharper at 250mm than it is as 200mm! This lens is really commendably sharp at 250mm, the edges are somewhat softer at some focal lengths but not terrible, sometimes there appears to be uneven sharpness at the edges of the frame which could be down to the stabilizer rather than decentring but overall, considering the price of the lens the sharpness is nothing less than astounding, you'll struggle to find anything as sharp in this price range by any other manufacturer.

The colour this lens produces seems to be in line with most other Canon lenses and is vibrant and well saturated. Contrast is also pretty good although it fades very slightly towards the long end but it's easily restored with post processing.

The bokeh is another pleasant surprise with this lens, overall it's commendably smooth and when the lens is used wide open highlights tend to be rendered quite attractively. It's not perfect and the aperture is not rounded so out of focus highlights will look somewhat angular when the lens isn't wide open and if you encourage it you can get the lens to produce ugly bokeh but overall it's really quite decent all things considered.

The lens suffers from only very mild chromatic aberrations in the most extreme circumstances and for day to day use it's pretty much a non issue, how do they manage it all at such a cheap price? There has to be something bad right?

Well as it turns out there are a few negatives, which is reassuring because I need every justification I can get for owning the 70-300mm L!

Firstly the lens vignettes like a mofo! The corners are VERY dark indeed when the aperture is wide open which can be very noticeable in some shots, it's not always a big hindrance and at the longer focal lengths subjects tend to be somewhat centralized anyway so it can be a non issue but it's worth mentioning because it is very strong and very pronounced in unfavourable circumstances. Some people don't mind vignetting at all and think it adds to a photo, I tend to agree a lot of the time but I would prefer to just add the effect in photoshop and have a choice! With this lens you will have vignetting if you use it wide open whether you like it or not!

Another issue I have found is that sometimes the image doesn't have consistent sharpness on each side of the image and whilst this could be down to a centering issue it doesn't happen all the time and only seems to occur when the stabilizer is active which leads to my crazy theory! I think the image stabilizer may play a role here because at this price point especially it's entirely possible that the corrective element/s show somewhat higher resolution in their centres than their edges so the harder the stabilizer works the more of the non optimum area of glass will be in use which could result in lower resolution in some parts of the frame, this is more a crackpot theory than fact although edge sharpness does appear to be more consistent when the stabilizer is turned off and it is a fact that the true optical path is interfered with when the stabilizer is active so who knows!

Those two problems although notable are rarely serious enough to spoil what is generally a sharp and punchy lens, what really spoils the party is actually not an image quality issue but something that can prevent you accessing that image quality which is the autofocus!

This lens seems to have a mind of it's own when it comes to focusing, sometimes it's fine and other times I can struggle to get one sharp shot out of a burst of ten! It doesn't matter if you're using AI servo or single shot there just seems to be a lot of inconsistency, I've stood at Cardiff bay with the sun nearly down and achieved good focus lock on speedboats going flat out in both single shot and AI servo mode and then on other occasions something as slow paced as my wife walking towards me at the beach has resulted in the lens missing focus almost every time regardless of focus mode!

Obviously some of this is just down to price, when I failed to get good focus with fast jets at an airshow it was obvious that I was expecting too much from the lens but when you have to take two or three attempts to get a photo of a building locked on you know there's something amiss. It's a pity because the focusing is actually very quiet for non USM and isn't too slow either but in terms of accuracy it's just not very reliable.

It's doubly maddening because a lot of the time the lens will get it spot on and often I sit at the computer going through images and the consistency is great until you get to that one perfectly timed photo that you've been waiting to check out on the monitor since you took it and you realise that was exactly when the lens decided to miss focus! I suppose I may have a bad one but I have heard similar stories from others so who knows?

In overall IQ terms this lens is a fantastic performer for the price but be careful of the autofocus, digital memory is cheap so take a few attempts at each shot and your chances of one being in focus will rise sharply but sadly this doesn't help when you have only a brief opportunity to get the shot where you will just have to hope for the best! The lens gets it right a lot of the time but there's definitely a higher than average failure rate so watch out! I think a lot of the time people just write this lens off as being cheap and soft when they are just experiencing focusing issues.

100% crop taken wide open at 250mm

100% crop taken wide open at 180mm











100% crop taken wide open at 250mm





100% crop taken wide open at 250mm

Conclusion?:

This lens has some flaws, it vignettes badly and the autofocus can be unreliable but overall the combination of image quality and build quality and overall performance is exceptional, the fact that the lens is sharp at 250mm wide open on an 18mp sensor is truly impressive, I can't think of any autofocus tele lens with image stabilization that comes close to performing as well as this for the price, it's genuinely unrivalled and represents value for money at it's most extreme!

Review: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 USM L IS

It was never my intention to purchase this lens originally, I was quite happy with my EF-S 55-250mm lens in all aspects apart from the focus in terms of both speed and accuracy which could be frustratingly unreliable for things such as airshows where you don't have the opportunity to have a few tries at a given subject. My plan was to buy the Canon 100-400mm to use for such occasions, the idea being that the autofocus is faster and works better in AI servo mode and of course the lens goes out to a much more powerful 400mm. So I would have the smaller, much more portable lens for carrying around and the larger professional lens for things such as airshows when using a tripod wouldn't be a hindrance, these two lenses in theory would cover all my autofocus needs comfortably!

It didn't work out quite that way though, primarily because it seems there are about two decent copies of the 100-400 in existence, I literally went through four copies of this lens before giving up and the best one I ever got was sharp at the bottom of the image and soft at the top, I think the quality control is appalling with these lenses, especially considering the price which I am not too proud to admit is the kind of money that takes me many years to save. When you're dealing with an amount of money that takes you that long to save you tend to get panicked and stressed easily when things go wrong and by copy number four I had endured just about all the stress I could take and gave up on the idea completely.

I was tempted by the Sigma 50-500mm OS but reviews seemed to give inconsistent opinions on sharpness and while the Sigma may be a bargain in the scheme of things I expect a lens to be sharp and to focus well when it costs upwards of £1000! There was also the Tamron 200-500mm but this was a similar story.

The only other option left was to make a sacrifice on the tele end so I narrowed it down to two options, any lens that ends at 300mm was going to be uncomfortably close to the 55-250mm so it would really need to offer the best image quality and thoroughly superior autofocus to be worth bothering with which narrowed it down to the new Tamron 70-300mm SP and the Canon 70-300mm L, I was reluctant to try the Canon because in some ways I would be paying the same as the 100-400mm would have cost for a lens that was essentially 50mm longer so I gave the Tamron a go but it just wasn't as good as I expected it to be, it was somewhat soft at 300mm so it really didn't seem to offer enough over the 55-250mm to be worth buying. Eventually I gave in and tried the Canon, it costs a colossal amount more than the 55-250mm and yet only gave 50mm more reach so it was a really tough decision to make and my fingers were firmly crossed that it would be worth it!

This lens divides opinion a lot and it isn't helped by the fact that the focal and aperture range have until now been very much associated with "consumer grade" lenses, nobody has ever attempted to make a top of the line professional something-300mm lens before but that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, it is a very useful focal range and providing the image quality is exceptional then even carrying such a huge price tag this lens could be a very powerful and versatile tool.

Build quality, finish and operation:

All I can say is WOW! This lens is built like a tank yet isn't as heavy or as huge as it looks in photos. The finish is superb with the usual Canon L textured finish over an all metal body which is also weather sealed. Having spent so much I was obviously eager to feel that my purchase had been justified but this really is the most tightly assembled and smooth Canon lens I have handled so far and easily outclasses the 100-400mm.

The autofocus is of the ring USM type and is blazingly fast, silent and offers full time manual focus so is everything I could hope for, so far the price is being justified!

The Image stabilizer is also very impressive and is Canons latest version offering up to a 4 extra f stops if you have steady hands and probably at least 2 stops if you have hands like mine which offer about as much stability as a bowl of jelly, once more the lens puts in a first rate performance!

Image Quality:

The good news continues when it comes to image quality too, it starts off blisteringly sharp at 70mm and stays that way all the way to 300mm, there may be tiny reduction in sharpness at 300mm but it's still absolutely pin sharp and offers resolution that has never been seen on such a lens before, the contrast is also superb all the way out to 300mm, the lens gives sharp, bright, colourful and punchy images at all apertures and all focal lengths, I have never felt the need to stop the lens down at any time! The lens produces only a negligible amount of chromatic aberrations throughout the zoom range which really helps to make images look super sharp. Furthermore, the lens appears to display absolutely no longitudinal chromatic aberrations (known as bokeh CA or bokeh fringing) at any aperture/focal length.

To top things off the lens even delivers very smooth and attractive bokeh including out of focus highlight discs that remain round thanks to the 8 curved aperture blades and suffer from no outlining effect.

I'm sure you get the idea by now but this lens is just a phenomenal performer at all settings and is easily the best zoom lens I have ever used and also comfortably beats many prime lenses. There is frequent discussion on the internet including the dpreview.com forum where it has been confirmed that this lens is as sharp as the Canon 70-200mm F/4 where the lenses overlap, the 70-200mm f/4 is considered by many to be the sharpest zoom lens ever made which I think says it all!

Conclusion?:

This lens is very expensive but it is absolutely fantastic in every aspect, the build quality is superb, the image quality is stunning and the focal range is versatile. While it may appear to be a consumer grade lens on steroids with a price to match the truth is that this is easily one of the finest zoom lenses Canon have ever made and I can say that without reservation! Yes it's expensive but it's sooooo worth it, this really is an exceptional lens in every way. The only thing that might make me give up this lens is the new version of the 100-400mm that is apparently waiting in the wings, it uses a conventional zoom action instead of the old fashioned push/pull "trombone" style mechanism and should be a far superior lens but it will have to be REALLY special for me to consider choosing it over the 70-300!