-=5D CLASSIC admirers, assemble! (5)

Question.. so do the majority of you guys shoot in neutral picture style and then pp?

The Devil wrote in post #13357482
Or you could just sell everything your neighbors own.

Anyways, as an UWA prime, how good of a choice is the Samyang 14mm F2.8? It has a rather high degree of barrel distortion, but how easy is it to correct? And I'm aware of the fact that in most occasions the barrel distortion is barely noticeable, but I'm referring to those few instances where it's noticeable and correction is necessary.

Also, astral photography, how accurate is the focus distance scale thingy?

The Sammy is great. As for distortion, it doesn't have barrel so much as "moustache" distortion, which is more complex. I downloaded a corrective that can be put into adobe (photoshop or LR), and there is a DoX (?) one as well. That really does the trick. The focus scale thingy is not correct at all. However, because it's so wide, for most shooting you just set it for 1.3 meters or so and you're good to go all day.
I don't know how to do astral photography, but there is some in the thread that looks awesome. Browse the thread and I think your questions will be answered...

BryantFC wrote in post #13357810
Question.. so do the majority of you guys shoot in neutral picture style and then pp?

More like RAW -> PP, I'd imagine.

Mookalafalas - Thanks for the fairly comprehensive answer, helped me quite a bit.

BryantFC wrote in post #13357810
Question.. so do the majority of you guys shoot in neutral picture style and then pp?

RAW > PP for me.

RAW for me, too.

Ah ok. I shoot raw and in neutral picture style but I'm assuming the picture stylechoices are more geared towards JPEG shooting?

i shoot raw + small jpeg(usually set to b/w because i'm colour blind and deal with all my colour choices in PP)

Bryan, before I answer this, first, congrats on getting the 5DC, and welcome to the "gang"!

Second, I'm curious since you have switched to the 5D from the 60D: what exactly about the 5D are you happy with compared to the 60D? Of course, I'm not asking about the wonderful screen and other features of the 5D, but what about the images specifically can you describe that give you more pleasure?

I'm asking because I've never worked with any of the newer bodies -- the only 1.6 crop bodies I've worked with have been my trusty ol' 30D and my daughter's old 400D, and yeah the 5D is a sweet upgrade in image quality there. And then I have my old 1D3, but those images hold very well beside the 5D images IQ-wise. But I'm curious about the IQ comparisons with the newest crop bodies!

BryantFC wrote in post #13357810
Question.. so do the majority of you guys shoot in neutral picture style and then pp?

OK, there is only one reason that I'm aware of for a Raw shooter to use the Neutral Picture Style. This is because the camera uses the Picture Styles to render the jpeg that is used in your image review and the Histogram (as well as the jpeg embedded in your Raw file for quick viewers).

So, the Picture Styles have settings for Contrast and Saturation that affect your histogram, and for most Picture Styles, those settings are higher than the Neutral or Faithful Picture Styles.

What this means is that the Histograms and the highlight "blinkies" can give misleading warnings of clipping highlights in the Brightness histogram, and of colors in the RGB histogram.

This is meaningful for those Raw shooters who look to use some variation of the ETTR technique, to raise the exposure of the image as close to the right edge of one or both of the histogram so that more light is collected, making image noise less noticeable (a higher signal-to-noise ratio). This can be especially important if you shoot at a higher ISO.

But, we don't want to clip colors and highlights, at least not ones that "matter" to our image, so we know to back off if we see the "blinkies" and/or the left side of the histogram being "jammed".

Now, as I said, most of your Picture Styles use a higher Contrast and Saturation to give jpegs "pop". This is even true of the Standard Picture Style, even though it shows Contrast and Saturation to be set to "0" by default. In fact, even Neutral and Faithful have a default setting that can give a False highight/saturation warning!

To see this in action, take a solid bright white object with some actual detail in it. A wedding dress would be great, of course, but even a sheet of bright white paper would do as long as the center portion was plain white for metering, and then there was detail outside of the center that would be included in the shot.

Now, you will want to be in the Spot metering mode for accurate metering, and you could be in the Manual Exposure mode to make the changes you need to make or in another mode with Exposure if your camera will be on a tripod (or other good support) so that the semi-auto modes are not thrown off by camera movement. And, for starters, set the camera Picture Style to Standard.

Have the target in good light, and at an angle perpindicular to the cameras "line of sight' -- you want to both properly meter it and then shoot with a reasonable aperture that will get your exposure but that also will get the detail within its depth of field.

Now, get the subject in your viewfinder, close enough so that the plain white area fills the metering circle around the center focusing spot.

Of course, if you are using a semi-auto mode with no Exposure Compensation, your exposure will be set so the meter needle is centered, which means that the camera will expose that white and turn it gray! This is how these things are designed! But it's not gray, it's white.

So, you have to set your exposure to "make it white". So as your first "practice" shot, raise your exposure/Exposure Compensation by 2 stops. The meter needle will move to the right edge of the meter scale. This is what you could call a "safe" white. And, in the Standard Picture Style, it will indeed appear safe. Take a shot and check the review/Play: depending on some variables, either no blinkies should appear or I guess they can, but at any rate the image tones should not be jamming the right edge of the histogram, all should be well with the world!

So, in practice, this "safe" setting won't hurt you...

But, moving on!

It is known that Raw files have more "highlight headroom than what we see with this approach, so the next step will to boldly go into that realm. I can give you what is evidently the "technical" limit, and that is that bright white can be exposed at +3 Stops EV without actually clipping. Of course, if you were shooting a jpeg with the Standard Picture Style, that would be, well, crazy! Go ahead and go another stop of EC or in manual -- the needle will no longer register on the scale of course. Take a shot. The one useful thing here will be to note that the histogram for the white is totally bunched against the edge, not to mentioned that the blinkies are totally insane.

But for this test now set your Picture Style to Neutral. Then you want to go one step further: you want to change your Contrast and Saturation levels to -4 (when you are in the PS menu, with Neutral selected, press the Jump button to start adjusting the settings).

Now, if you take a shot, depending on your camera and whatnot, you may see blinkies, but note that at the right of the histogram the tones have pulled back "a bit" -- not much, but enough to show a difference.

Now, like I said, that's like a "technical limit" -- in other words, if you open those +3 EV shots in your Raw processor, you should see an RGB reading of "a bit less" than clipped, and you should be able to get the detail in that white target.

But, how practical it is to push things that far, I don't know. But it is an interesting area to consider and explore a bit, even if we want to play it a bit safer, say by setting white to +2 2/3 Ev instead of +3 EV.

And, the purpose of the test was to show the Neutral "difference".

Now I'll say that I think that the older 5D may not be as good as showing the difference as, say, my 1D3. When I ran this test with the 1D3 it acually showed +3 EV without blinkies, if I recall correctly, wereas my 5D does show blinkies, and even some at +2 EV. So in that sense the 5D may not show as useful info at that level of pushing.

Anyway, other than that, I don't know of any reason for a Raw shooter to bother with a Picture Style at all, since the only Raw processor that even bothers with them is Digital Photo Professional (DPP).

Did my first ever senior portrait shoot today, had an absolute blast! Still have a lot of editing to do, but here is one that has stood out too me so far.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …316952260/in/ph​otostream/

tophotowa wrote in post #13359308
Did my first ever senior portrait shoot today, had an absolute blast! Still have a lot of editing to do, but here is one that has stood out too me so far.

Very nice!

Pillow fight league

tonylong wrote in post #13359105
Bryan, before I answer this, first, congrats on getting the 5DC, and welcome to the "gang"!

Second, I'm curious since you have switched to the 5D from the 60D: what exactly about the 5D are you happy with compared to the 60D? Of course, I'm not asking about the wonderful screen and other features of the 5D, but what about the images specifically can you describe that give you more pleasure?

I'm asking because I've never worked with any of the newer bodies -- the only 2.6 crop bodies I've worked with have been my trusty ol' 30D and my daughter's old 400D, and yeah the 5D is a sweet upgrade in image quality there. And then I have my old 1D3, but those images hold very well beside the 5D images IQ-wise. But I'm curious about the IQ comparisons with the newest crop bodies!

Wow, thanks for the informative post Tony! Although I did understand much of that while I was shooting my 60D, I shot mostly in RAW and edited in lightroom and photoshop. The reason why I switched was because I had a faint issue of looking at my photos and "missing" something. Maybe it's user error but alot of my shots i did felt too "digital". I'll be honest, when I first got the 5D, i was a little discourage. Mostly because my first test shots were in my tiny room lol. Once i got out the house and shot with it, i was immediately impressed with how huge the depth of field is between subject and background. I didn't get that with the 60D (at least for what i was doing, still life/portraiture shooting). I'm on a limited budget and kept aiming at the similar focal lengths that mimic the whole "full frame" look. So my Sigma 30mm was the only thing that worked well in terms of giving me a nice 50mm look. Alas, just wasn't enough. I felt like i had to invest into some ultra wider lenses (14mm, 24mm, etc) to give me the focal lengths i was chasing to be on a crop. I used the camera mostly for video but since i moved onto stills more, it wasn't a necessity.

I'm very happy with the jump. Honestly can't see myself going back to APS-C unless I really need to but for photography, this 5D does wonders for me so far. Guess it's a bit cliche but the "FF" has a little bit of magic due to the larger sensor. Although it's older tech, i can live with it.

So far I only have the nifty fifty and my rokinon 85mm. The pictures i posted a couple pages back were with the rokinon. I am aware that I should invest into some quality glass ie canon's L lenses but they're completely out of my budget for the time being. Could you or anyone else recommend good affordable lenses? I have my eyes on upgrading the 50mm to the Sigma's 50mm since I love the creamy bokeh it creates. I'll need something else UWA to cover that field and possibly a zoom? While owning the 60D i was impressed by the 55-250mm lens by canon but it's EF-S. I read about the 75-300mm but the IQ is subpar.

So far my ideal lenses to fit what i have for the time being would be:
Sigma 50mm F1.4
Tamron AF 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 SP Di VC
Canon 28mm F2.8
Rokinon (Samyang) 14mm F2.8

Toss in your tips guys!

I'm in LOVE with this camera

OH btw, the ONLY feature that i miss greatly from the 60D is back button focusing. I don't have access to an english manual of the 5D and i was wondering is there any way to do so on the 5D? If so explain how?

I could be wrong but you should be able to change your exposure lock button to autofocus. I don't use thumb focus so that's not a concern of mine.

jwcdds wrote in post #13359552
I could be wrong but you should be able to change your exposure lock button to autofocus. I don't use thumb focus so that's not a concern of mine.

Sweet, simple as pie haha. Shot this earlier today with a friend who went to pick up an acoustic.

I googled the 5D Canon manual well before I purchased it. Manual is available on-line as PDF file.
It is in "user settings" if I'm not mistaken. I'm using bbf as well.