How-To » Dan Carr Photography - Photography Product Reviews + Ski, Snowboard and adventure photography tips

Travel Tip : Traveling With Pelican Cases

Apr 102012

Today I have a quick tip for you if you are going to travel with camera equipment in Pelican cases. These types of cases provide excellent protection for any gear that needs to travel in the hold of the aircraft, but people know that expensive equipment lies within. They can become a target for theft and also draw time consuming attention from customs officials who want to see what you have in the case. My solution for this issue is a simple one, simply place my Pelican case inside a large duffel bag. The one I use came from Eddie Bauer but you can find these large types of bags in practically any outdoor store. Now it looks the same as any other bag on the baggage conveyor belt! Now I’m not saying you should be trying to fool customs agents, absolutely not! If you are traveling with something that needs to be declared then you should most definitely do so. But if you are simply moving your own camera gear around and are in a hurry to get out of the airport ( who isn’t these days ?!) then passing through with a duffel bag probably won’t get you a second look.

Rumor Silly Season Is Nearly Upon Us

Cameras, Canon, Industry News, Snow Photos 101 No Responses »

Jun 012011

Around this time of year he rumor mills really start to turn the greasy wheels. July, August and September are often months that see the key players in the industry announce new products either for immediate delivery, or increasingly in recent years , for deliver before Christmas. In the last few years a wealth of websites have cropped up to deal with rumors for specific camera brands. A few of these sites have good track records in tracking down new information long before anything official is released by the manufacturers. Some of the other sites……. well they don’t have the best of luck. Often there are snippets of correct information but it’s muddled in amongst bogus specs and rarely are things correct many months out. Once things get close to an official announcement the rumors start to get a closer to the real deal.

I’m sure we are going to see weekly updates on these sites with supposed specs on new gear, one thing for certain though is that Sony, Nikon and Canon can be expected to make some major announcement in this time frame.

Sony looks set to bring an A77 to the market in July featuring their pellicule mirror technology to an APS-C camera with some decent specs to sit above their A55.

Nikon will be replacing the D3 and the D700 at some point. It seems likely that at least one of these will be in August. Before the Pixiq tradeshow was cancelled, Nikon and Canon were probably planning on releasing things at that show.

You guys know that for me it’s the Canon gear that I’m most interested in. The website Canon Rumors has had so many conflicting reports over the months it’s hard to make sense of it. We will certainly see an official release of the 200-400 f4 L IS which was announced as in development some months ago. We have also been waiting for an eternity for a 24-70 f2.8 replacement. Its been reported that there are several patents and test versions out there, some with IS and some without. I’d say this one will finally come alongside some sort of 1dsMKIII replacement. There has also been some reports that the 1d and 1ds line will be merged. Not sure about that one! And of course it’s about time for a 5dMKIII too. On top of that there has been rumors of a 35mm f1.4 II and the much needed 50mm f1.4 II. My bet would be on the 35mm to come first. Continue reading »

Flash Synchronization and SLR Shutters

How-To No Responses »

Feb 062011

Over at ProPhotoCoalition I posted a pretty cool little video that details some great info on flash synchronization and SLR shutters by New York based photographer Paul Duncan

10 New Years Resolutions for Photographers

How-To, Site news 2 Responses »

Jan 012011

Another year has passed by in a flash and there have been many developments in the photography world. I achieved a lot of my personal goals for my photography in 2010 and I hope you all did too. If you aren’t quite sure where to take your photography in 2011, here are some suggestions to help you on your way!

5dMKII bit rate hack! Magic lantern firmware update.

5d Mark II, Canon, DSLR Video, How-To, Industry News 1 Response »

Dec 062010

Fans and users of the Canon 5dMKII will probably remember Tramm Hudson’s incredible firmware update that he created LONG before Canon did to allow for various additional features like audio meters, zebra stripes and a feature to disable the auto audio gain. Well ever since Canon’s own 24p firmware update that also included manual audio control, all has been quiet from Tramm and his Magic Lantern firmware. Until today!

Tramm has just released a new version of his firmware and this time it follows in a similar direction to the popular Panasonic GH1 bit rate hack. Essentially it allows you to select from many different bit rates during video recording, greatly increasing the quality of the video. In 24p mode, 66mb/s seems to be the highest it will go for sustained recording but higher is possible if you just want a quick shot.

As with the previous versions of Magic Lantern , the firmware is loaded into the cameras RAM so you have to install it each time you turn the camera on by keeping the firmware on the memory card you are using. This is a safety feature which SHOULD stop you from bricking your 5dMKII… Not my fault if it does happen though! Proceed with some caution.

I suspect that you will find much better results with faster CF cards. Obviously you need something that writes faster than the bit rate in order to sustain it so a 90mb/s Sandisk card would be a good start. Thanks to Tramm for such amazing work!

Q-scale FPS Mbps Notes
+8 30p 7 Mbps Very low quality
-9 24p 32 Mbps
-10 24p 41 Mbps
-11 24p 51 Mbps
-12 24p 59 Mbps
-13 24p 62 Mbps
-14 24p 66 Mbps Best, sustainable in 24p mode?
-15 24p 68 Mbps 2 buffer bars
-16 24p 76 Mbps Only a few seconds

Canon 5d Mark II 76 MBps Test with Magic Lantern High Bit Rate Firmware from RockStar Media on Vimeo.

My backup routine

How-To, Snow Photos 101 6 Responses »

Nov 222010

All hard drives will fail with 100% certainty. The only question is when ? It could be after a week, or it could be three or four years, but because they are mechanical it is a certain event. If you are not keeping redundant backups of your photos then at some point it is guaranteed you will loose some of your photos. They might be some family holiday snaps with only sentimental value or they might be your best selling stock images with a residual value of $100,000s . Either way there are some simple precautions you can take to prevent this from happening.

Different sizes of photography business will benefit from slightly different routines. If you are running a huge photo studio with 10 employees working on projects constantly then check out Chase Jarvis’ site for info on that scenario. My business is relatively small in comparison because I do that majority of the work myself, shooting, archiving, editing and client delivery are all done from my workstation and most of the time done by me when I am around. So if you are a one-man-band then this will be a bit more suitable to your needs. There are plenty of other permutations on how to handle this but this is what works for me. I will go into specific downloading workflow and Lightroom work in future articles, this one is just concerned with backup.

Office scenario (when I am not traveling)

Used cards from the day’s shooting are stacked up on my desk in one pile. In turn I take each card and put them into my Sandisk card reader. I use Lightroom 3 to ingest the photos from the card and tag them with the necessary metadata for the shoot. I use the COPY command in the Lightroom import interface and this is VERY important. If you use the MOVE command then it will delete the files from the memory card after it has moved them to your hard drive. By using COPY I am creating a copy of the file on my drive, and the original shot still remains on the memory card for the moment. All the files from the card are copied onto my DROBO storage unit into a folder called “Photo Archive” where they are then put into another folder labeled with the year and then a further folder with the date in dd/mm/yyyy format. For every day of shooting then I have a separate folder. If you are not familiar with DROBO storage then I suggest a read of their website which contains extensive videos on their usage. Basically they are somewhat similar to RAID systems in that they make duplicates of your files so if one drive in the DROBO fails, the data is still available on another drive and you have not lost anything. So at this point I now effectively have two copies of the photos on the DROBO (because it creates duplicates automatically) and one copy still on the memory card. Continue reading »