Month: January 2019

Heading South to Get Wet

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Today I’m packing my bags to fly south to Vancouver from the Yukon. I’ll spend a couple of days running some errands around the city and catching up with some friends and then I’m taking a series of three different ferries to end up on Hornby Island where I’ll be freediving with sea lions for a few days. Hornby Island is a small island in the Straight of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the British Columbian mainland. I have been making regular visits to Vancouver Island for a while now and it’s easily one of my favourite wildlife photography destinations.

Lenses & Gear For Sale

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Hey folks, I’m doing a bit of spring cleaning in the gear closet and I have a few things for sale. If you are seriously interested in any of these items, use the contact form to send me a message and I’ll get back to you with details and photos of the items you are interested in. Prices are in Canadian dollars. All items are in at least 9/10 condition. I take good care of my gear! (And no, I’m not leaving Canon, just repurposing some assets for other projects) – Canon 11-24mm f/4 L $2400– Canon 200-400 f/4 L

Can You Fly with a Tripod?

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I have often wondered what the official stance on this is, but it turns out there’s a simple page on the TSA website that tells you the answer. Clearly it says that monopods and tripod are ok to travel with, as long as they fall within luggage dimensional limits. Of course those vary from airline to airline, but roughly speaking I’d say that it gives you room for a 21″ long tripod, as long as when strapped to the side of your bag it doesn’t then push your other bag dimensions over the limit. Seems reasonable. The CATSA (Canadian version

Canon’s Missing Fast Prime – The Sigma 28mm f/1.4 is Here

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I have always been a fan of the 28mm focal length and long wondered why there was never an EF 28mm f/1.4 L lens in Canon’s otherwise exhaustive lens lineup. Well, today Sigma solved that with the launch of the Sigma 28mm f/1.4 ART. Available now to pre-order from B&H for $1399. Shipping will start on January 25th. Nikon F-mount is also available for pre-order, but it’s not yet clear when the Sony E-mont version will come to market. Later this year we should also see an L-mount version of this lens for Sigma’s upcoming full-frame mirrorless camera, as well

Adobe Finally Fixes Lightroom Healing Brush?!? It’s FAST now.

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For years the healing brush tool in Lightroom (Classic) has been pathetically slow and essentially useless unless you only used it to fix one or two tiny spots on an image. If you added any more than that, Lightroom would slow to a crawl. For the most part it forced me to export the image to Photoshop to use their healing and cloning tools when I needed to fix dust spots or remove small imperfections because it was so much faster. Today I was editing a photo in Lightroom Classic (build 1200465) and I noticed that the healing brush seemed

Gear Check: Anker PowerPort Cube

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Anker make a ton of awesome power accessories and the PowerPort Cube is my new favourite travel power strip. Sometimes you just can’t find enough power sockets in a hotel room so a power strip is a useful travel accessory. The problem is that traditional power strips, with their side-by-side sockets, often make it difficult to plug in multiple battery chargers. The cubic shape of the Anker PowerPort Cube solves this problem entirely, and it even has three USB ports on it too, so you can keep your phone and other smaller devices charged. This thing solves so many charging

Gear of the Year – 2018

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For the past few years I have written a post at the beginning of the year where I discuss some of my favourite and most-used items of the past 12 months. For 2017 I wrote about the Canon 11-24mm f/4L, the RRS TFC-14 tripod, the Drobo 5D3 and a few other bits and bobs. Looking back on 2018, as I’m doing right now, I realize that the content of my gear closet hasn’t changed all that much. I didn’t buy any new DSLRs in 2018, and I didn’t even buy any new lenses – I can’t remember the last time