Conor & Ildica's Place

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June 19, 2007

Camera and kit

My mate Macartan from Queens Mountaineering Club days asked what camera kit I'm currently using, so here's a quick synopsis:

• Canon EOS 350D with the somewhat ordinary 18-55mm kit lens.
• Velbon CX540 tripod; a nice present from my folks a couple of years ago, reasonably lightweight, fine for current landscape shots on calm mornings/evenings, etc.
• Circular polarizing filter for most of the outdoor photos; hence the need for the tripod at times, since I like shooting at low ISO (100 or 200), and the circular polarizer cuts out another stop or two of light. Circular polarizer really adds pop to vivid blue skies and outdoor shots in general.
• Canon RC-1 remote controller for tripping the shutter while the camera is on the tripod. This comes with a handy little clip which means it clips nicely onto the camera strap.

I only got this DSLR at Christmas (from my lovely wife), and only really feel now that I'm getting to grips with it. I'm starting to notice the lack of sharpness in the kit lens, and would like to replace it with something like this Sigma. Unfortunately, it's about NZ$600, so I might have to wait until next Christmas!
I shoot RAW format images on the camera (as opposed to JPEG), and am currently using Adobe Photoshop CS2 including Adobe Camera Raw for post processing the RAWs. I don't think I've got my home monitor particularly well calibrated, and I suspect I'm processing my photos to end up a little on the dark side. I'm also not currently going to a lot of trouble to resize my images specifically for our website, so the resolution/quality of the ones on the website is probably not brilliant.
There's so much I feel I still have to learn on the post processing front, but I'm learning quite a lot from the DPReview forums.
For panoramas, I now shoot candidate shots for a panorama in portrait (i.e. camera on it's side), so it requires an extra shot or two to cover the breadth of the panorama. I do a little tweaking in Adobe Camera Raw before loading up Hugin to build the panorama as a TIF file. A bit of sharpening etc in Photoshop and then I export it as a smaller JPEG.
I've acquired a couple of digital photography and Photoshop books by Scott Kelby, and I'm waiting for another one on RAW processing from Amazon which should be here this week.
Thanks for the feedback and the compliments, Macartan!

Posted by conor at June 19, 2007 11:28 PM