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Canon's New EOS 7D: Bigger, Faster, Smarter, Stronger

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:46:42 -0500

Canon fired the latest salvo in the hotter-than-ever digital SLR wars this week, introducing its new EOS 7D. The $1699 (body-only) EOS 7D includes some now-familiar features, such as APS-C image sensor size (1.6x crop factor), 3-inch LCD with Live View, and Full HD Video.

The $1699 (body-only) EOS 7D includes some now-familiar features, such as the APS-C image sensor size (1.6x crop factor), 3-inch LCD with Live View, and Full HD Video. Here's what's new and different.

Bigger - The EOS 7D cranks up the size of several subsystems, including

18MP image sensor
Two DIGIC 4 image processors for faster image processing and better low-light performance
ISO expandable to 12,800
100% viewfinder coverage
19-point autofocus
63 zone dual-layer metering that uses AF and color information for better exposure and image quality

Faster - Shoot faster with the EOS 7D, thanks to

8 fps burst shooting (up to 126 large JPEG or up to 15 RAW; requires Ultra DMA Compact Flash Card)
1080HD video mode now offers frame rates up to 30 fps and includes adjustable frame rates for all supported video resolutions

Smarter - The EOS 7D provides a smarter viewfinder and AF system for better information and composition

New toggleable LCD overlay for better framing and focusing even in total darkness
New Spot AF mode for focusing on tiny areas of a scene
AF Point expansion (borrowed from the EOS 1D series) automatically shifts to adjacent focus points if the selected manual focus point loses focus
Improved automatic AF point selection and Zone AF

Stronger - The EOS 7D is designed to stand up to protracted use:

Magnesium body with dust and weather resistant features
Shutter rated for up to 150,000 cycles

Lens Options, Accessories and More Information

The EOS 7D will also be bundled with Canon's 28-135mm EF IS lens, which provides framing comparable to a 45-215mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera. The kit will sell for an estimated $1,899.

Wide-angle fans will want to consider Canon's new 15-85mm EF-S IS (24-135 35mm equivalent) and 18-135mm EF-S IS (28-215mm 35mm equivalent) lenses.

Canon's new optional WFT-E5A Wireless File Transmitter ($699.99) provides a variety of storage and backup options for the EOS 7D, including the ability to record to a USB external hard disk and an Ultra DMA Compact Flash card inside the camera at the same time, and it also supports geotagging through Bluetooth. Learn more about the EOS 7D and WFT-E5A here.

Learn more about the EOS 7D's new AF features here.

Are you excited about the new features in the 7D? Wishing it had a different mix of goodies? Click Comment and sound off.

Photo courtesy Canon USA.

Live Photo Gallery Vs. Picasa: Digital Photography in Windows 7

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:00:00 -0500

Windows 7 has the potential to be the most imaging-friendly version of Windows yet developed. Windows 7 makes viewing JPEG and other common file formats easy, displays exposure metadata, and supports more viewing options than Windows XP, while offering better performance than Windows Vista. However, to get the maximum benefit from Windows 7, digital photographers will want to make two additions:

Installing RAW image support for their DSLR
Installing a photo organizer and editor

Wondering how to get RAW support for 64-bit versions of Windows 7? Not sure which free program (Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picasa) is better at fixing common digital photo problems? Looking for the best solution for organizing your rapidly growing digital photo collection? This article helps you find the answers you need.

Adding RAW Image Support for Your Camera

Windows 7's Pictures Explorer shows thumbnail views of JPEG and other supported imaging formats when you select the Medium icon, Large icon (default), or Extra Large icon views. However, RAW files (which are camera-specific) display only icons if you have not already installed the appropriate codecs for your camera. To install RAW file support for your camera:

Open your favorite web browser.
Navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/codecs.aspx
Click the link for your camera.
Verify that the codec works with your camera and Windows release (32-bit or 64-bit)
Download and install the codec.

After installing the appropriate codec, you will be able to see thumbnail views for both JPEG and RAW files in Pictures Explorer:

Flling the Missing 64-bit Version Codec Support Gap

Unfortunately, some digital SLR vendors do not provide 64-bit codecs. However, Ardfry Imaging, LLC offers 32-bit and 64-bit versions of its independently-developed codecs for Canon CR2, Nikon NEF, and Adobe DNG file formats ($29.95 each). 15-day free trials are available. Because I'm currently using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC Ultimate, I was unable to use the Canon-provided codec. However, the Ardfry codec worked fine on my 64-bit system.

Using the Built-in Windows Photo Viewer

In Windows 7, Microsoft replaced the Windows Photo Gallery (now superseded by Windows Live Photo Gallery), and replaced it with Windows Photo Viewer. To use Windows Photo Viewer to view your photos in a resizable window, right-click the photo and select Preview.

You can rotate, zoom in, print, burn your photos to CD or DVD, and view your photos in a slide show. From the File menu, you can view Properties, which opens the Details tab to display image metadata, tags, and similar information.

However, Windows Photo Viewer lacks tagging, repair, and filtering tools. To get these, consider adding Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picasa 3.0 to your system. How do these free products compare? First, let's look at the major features of both programs.

Major Features of Windows Live Photo Gallery

Works in individual picture mode or gallery mode
Gallery mode organizes photos (and videos) by folder, date, and tag
Easy "drag to tag" image tagging
Zoom and pan control while viewing individual photos.
Easy, useful auto adjust image repair
Repair tools for white balance, tint, exposure, tilted photos, and red-eye
Cropping to common print sizes, widescreen, or custom page sizes
Image sharpening
Various black-and-white conversion effects, plus sepia and cyan
Multi-level undo/redo
Revert to original image
Integration with Flickr photo sharing
Plug-in support to enable integration with Facebook and other popular photo-sharing sites
Can use Windows Live Skydrive for online photo storage

Major Features of Picasa 3.0

Can scan entire system for photos or only typical locations
Basic photo fixes: crop, straighten, redeye, "I'm Feeling Lucky" auto tuning, auto contrast, auto color, retouch, text overlay, and fill light
Tuning menu: fill light, highlights, shadows, and color temperature, and a neutral color picker.
Effects menu: filters, sharpening, and black-and-white effects
Creates and prints collages
Designs banners
Integrated with Blogger, Picasa Web Albums
Tagging
Batch processing
Can edit and save RAW files as JPEG
HTML Export
Integration with TiVo
Integration with Google Earth for geotagging
Contact sheet printing

As far as features are concerned, Picasa packs plenty more than Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG). But, how well do these programs do at repairing problem photos?

Windows Live Photo Gallery Fix (Repair) Menus

Picasa 3.0's Repair Tools

Performing Common Photo Repairs

Although Picasa offers more photo repair tools than WLPG, that doesn't necessarily mean they're better. Compare the results when repairing an underexposed and off-color photo using auto repair tools Auto Adjust (WLPG) and I'm Feeling Lucky (Picasa):

WLPG's Auto Adjust provides a more natural, less harsh repair.

A much tougher repair task is trying to darken an overexposed photo. For this type of repair, I used WLPG's Adjust Exposure menu and Adjust Color menus and Picasa's Tuning menu:

Again, WLPG does a more natural job.

Picasa has two big advantages over WLPG,though:

Picasa can perform batch editing of selected photos.
Picasa can edit RAW files and convert them to JPEG. By contrast, WLPG can only view RAW files.

Here's Picasa's batch edit feature in action:

Saving and Undoing Photo Repairs

WLPG saves changes automatically as soon as you view another photo. Picasa's photo repairs aren't saved until you click the Save to Disk button at the top of each folder listing. Unfortunately, Picasa doesn't display any icons to show which photos have been edited. However, Windows Live Photo Gallery places checkmarks next to each editing tool you have used for the current photo.

Windows Live Photo Gallery offers a multi-level Undo feature at the bottom of its menu structure. Picasa has undo buttons on each of its menus, but doesn't display all of the edits in a single location.

Both programs save previous versions and permit reversions: WLPG uses the shadow copy feature built into Windows 7's system protection (restore points) feature, while Picasa retains the previous version internally.

Tagging Photos

By tagging photos, you make it possible to find photos of a particular person, place, object, or event quickly, no matter what folder they're found in. Both WLPG and Picasa support tagging, but how they do it and what they use tags for is very different.

Windows Live Photo Gallery now supports two types of tags: People tags and Descriptive tags. It is also compatible with tags applied with older versions or with Windows Vista's Windows Photo Gallery. Those tags are placed in the Descriptive tags category, but tags for people can be dragged to the People tags category. To create a tag in WLPG, click the appropriate Add a New Tag button and enter the tag name. To add the tag to matching photos or videos, select the photos or videos and drag them to the tag. It's a system quite similar to what Adobe's been doing with Photoshop Elements' Organizer and other products:

To view photos matching the tag, click the tag. In this example, photos from two different folders are displayed with a single click. By signing into Windows Live, you can also see if this person is sharing photos.

You can add multiple people and/or descriptive tags to a photo using the same technique: create the tag, select the photos or videos, and drag the media to the tag, repeating as needed with different tags

In Picasa, you must select each photo, click View, Tags, and enter the tag or tags for the photo. Picasa Web Albums makes extensive use of tags for organization, but Picasa itself does not use tags for filtering.

Sharing Photos

Windows Live Photo Gallery now integrates with Flickr as well as Windows Live albums. To set up integration with Flickr, you select your photos, click Publish, Publish on Flickr, and follow the prompts to authorize Flickr to work with Windows Live Photo Gallery. Once the integration is done, select Publish on Flickr, and Windows Live Photo Gallery sends the photos to the Flickr account you specify, adds them to a photo set you specify, resizes the photos as you specify, and sets the permissions you prefer:

To add support for other services, open Publish, More Services, and Add a Plug-In. You can choose from plugins for Facebook 2.0, YouTube, SmugMug, Picasa Web Publisher, Drupal Publisher, Pixelpipe, and Ipernity.

Picasa supports Blogger (no surprise there, as both are Google products), but it has no support for other photo sharing services. You must use their clients to share from photo folders, with no help from Picasa.

Which One's For You?

As you can see from this comparison, both programs offer a lot to the digital photographer who's not ready to jump into Photoshop Elements but wants decent tools for working with digital photos. Here's how I see it:

Choose Picasa if you're looking for a "Swiss Army Knife"-like set of photo editing and effects tools, especially if you use both JPEG and RAW file types, or if you want special photo effects without moving up to a full-blown photo editor. However, Picasa's tagging and file management tools are clunky and aren't well implemented. Picasa also offers MacOS and Linux versions if you want to use it cross-platform.

Choose Windows Live Photo Gallery if you're mainly concerned about photo and video organization but want high-quality photo repair tools for JPEG images. While WLPG's doesn't offer the effects and creative tools that Picasa does, it often makes better photo repairs - but sadly, only for JPEG files. WLPG, unlike Picasa, also displays videos and can tag them for easy access.

Can you use both? If you're using only JPEG photos, you certainly can. However, I noticed that when I installed Picasa after installing Windows Live Photo Gallery and codecs, I could no longer view RAW thumbnails in Picture Explorer or other folders.

Where to Find Them

The easiest way to get Windows Live Photo Gallery is to open the Getting Started menu in Windows 7 and click Get Windows Live Essentials. You can select the programs you want to install. To obtain Picasa, visit http://picasa.google.com. If you are also using older versions of Windows, both programs also work with Windows XP and Windows Vista. To download Windows Live components for these versions of Windows, go to http://download.live.com/.

Mark Soper is the author of the forthcoming book The Shot Doctor: The Amateur's Guide to Taking Great Digital Photos.

Millions of LIFE Magazine Photos Now Available on Google Images

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:47:35 -0600

LIFE Magazine, which published classic photojournalism from Maragaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, David Douglas Duncan and many others during its various incarnations as a weekly (1936-72), special issue (1972-78), monthly (1978-2000), and Sunday supplement (2004-2007), lives again, thanks to the new LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.

Ultimately, about 10 million photos (only about 3 percent of them ever published) will be available at Google. There's no need to wait to explore this rich photo heritage, though: about three million are already online.

So, what can you do with photos ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Winston Churchill, World War II to Vietnam, Muhammed Ali to the King of Siam? You can view photos in three different sizes, including high-resolution (5MP-6MP) sizes and use them for personal or research purposes. As the official annoucement puts it:

LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc.

Full-size images are watermarked with the familiar block-letter LIFE logo. If you want to order a framed fine art print, click the "Purchase Image" link on each image's information page.

The easiest way to search the image archive is to open the Google LIFE Magazine images portal and use its search tool to search by keyword or photographer name. You can also click preconfigured searches by decade or by subject. If you want to use the standard Google Image search, use subject source:Life in the search box. To learn more about the collection, see articles at the Google blog and Searchengineland.

Whether you remember the heyday of photojournalism, are looking for the most famous photos of the 20th century, or just like good photography, you'll enjoy LIFE's newest incarnation. Thanks, Google!

What classic photos do you remember from LIFE Magazine? Hit Comment and tell us about your favorites.

Time for a New Tech Preview of Deep Zoom Composer

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:35:05 -0500

Microsoft has released an updated technology preview of its cool Deep Zoom Composer tool for Silverlight 2. As we reported back in July, Deep Zoom Composer gives you the ability to display multiple high-resolution thumbnails, zoom in for a closeup, and pan back again. You can use Deep Zoom Composer to create mosaics (as in our original story), or to bring a new level of interactivity to online collections (as the Hard Rock Cafe has done).

If you want to give it a try, install the latest version of Silverlight 2 beta first, then install the Deep Zoom Composer technology preview 0.9.0005. Deep Zoom Composer runs on Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and Windows Vista, and requires a 2GHz Intel or AMD processor, at least 1GB of RAM, and a Microsoft DirectX 9-capable video card with at least 256MB of video memory.

See the Teaching Ideas and Resources blog at MSDN for more information about this and other imaging tools from Microsoft.

Hit the Comments button to share links to your creations!

Haven't Flickred Lately? Time to Log In and Enjoy a New Home Page!

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:29:44 -0500

Flickr's rolled out a new home page design that's intended to make it easier to see what's happening with your Flickr account and on Flickr in general.

Here's what's new:

The Your Photostream section now shows your five most recent uploads
Your Photostream also has a toggle to show recent activity (such as comments from friends, your replies, and pictures selected as favorites). Don't want any more comments on a particular item? Click its Mute button.
Click More Recent Activity to see other activity and change activity settings.
The Your Contacts section now shows more photos.
The Your Groups section now shows the most recent photos from your groups.
Want to reduce page clutter? Click the double arrow icon next to a section title to close it, or click it again to open it.
There's now a new Explore module on the home page that displays the latest activities.
The latest entry at the Flickr Blog and the latest Flickr Tip occupy the right margin of the page, along with more ways to use your photos.

Haven't logged in for awhile? I think you'll like the changes. Hit the Comment button and let us know if you agree - or not.

Flickr logo courtesy of Vectorlogo.blogspot.com.

DSLR Compact Flash Users, Get Into the SD/SDHC (and Eye-Fi) Game with CFMulti

Mark Edward Soper — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:32:52 -0500

If you're a Compact Flash user, life's not been fair to you lately. You've seen CF stalwarts like Nikon and Canon turn their backs on this longtime favorite in favor of the new kid on the block, SDHC, in their newest DSLRs. Buy a new camera, and you make your collection of CF cards obsolete. Meanwhile, you've watched SDHC and its kid brother, SD, dominate the deals in your favorite big-box electronics superstores' weekly tabloids. And, just to add a cherry on the top of your cake of frustration, you've been thinking about how cool it would be to use wireless file transfer with Eye-Fi cards, but Eye-Fi is also in the tank for SD. Oh, and did I mention that "Compact" Flash is now the bulkiest flash memory format?

For all these reasons, Synchrotech's introduction of the CFMulti CompactFlash Type II to Eye-Fi + Multi-Card Adapter has come at a very good time. While CF adapters for SD cards have been around for awhile, the CFMulti also supports newer flavors such as SDHC and MMC+ as well as SD and any old MultiMediaCards (MMC) you have floating around. Plus, it's the first adapter to support Eye-Fi cards, albeit with a reduction in range. See the CFMulti and Eye-Fi FAQ for details and a list of tested cameras.

In addition to enabling some CF-based cameras to use Eye-Fi cards, this adapter will be helpful to users of Nikon and Canon DSLRs that use a mixture of CF and SD/SDHC cards. At $28.00, it takes some of the sting out of making the move from CF-based cameras such as the Canon Rebel XTi or Nikon D70 to SD/SDHC-based cameras like the Canon Rebel XSi, Rebel XS or Nikon D90. You can still use high-speed UDMA Compact Flash cards when you need the absolute best speed on your CF-based cameras, but you can now take advantage of numerous deals on easier-to-tote SD and SDHC cards. Sweet!

Hit Comments to tell us if CFMulti's going to make your digital photography life easier.

CFMulti illustration courtesy of Terry White's Tech Blog.

Eye-Fi Gets Twittering, RSSing with New Manager Update

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:40:30 -0500

The Eye-Fi line of Wi-Fi enabled SD cards just keeps getting more social. The October update of the Eye-Fi Manager, in addition to adding à la carte support for geotagging, webshare, and hotspot access service updates, also adds support Twitter and RSS integration. You can use Twitter to tell your contacts when you have new photos posted on line, and RSS support enables you to publish pictures in real-time to your preferred RSS aggregator.

Eye-Fi now offers cards through its online store as well as at an ever-growing list of retailers.

RSS logo courtesy Variawa.co.za.

Eye-Fi Users, Circle October 5th for Big Changes

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:03:25 -0500

At Photokina this week, Eye-Fi, makers of the first Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards, announced two improvements to its product family effective October 5th:

First, a firmware update will double the photo transfer speed from Eye-Fi cards from the current 350KBps to 700KBps.
Second, users of Eye-Fi cards will be able to add the photo transfer features of their choice to cards that were not bundled with these features.

Here are the new options:

Users of the entry-level Eye-Fi Home card can add web sharing for $9.99/year, making the card equivalent in features to the Eye-Fi Share card.
Users of the Eye-Fi Home or Share card can add geotagging for $14.99/year.
And, users of the Eye-Fi Share card can add automatic uploading at open hotspots or at Wayport hotspots (there are over 10,000 of those) for $14.99/year.

By adding geotagging and hotspot support, users of Eye-Fi Share cards make these cards equivalent to Eye-Fi Explore cards.

The already long list of online photo sharing services Eye-Fi supports now includes Apple's MobileMe and AdoramaPix, effective immediately. Eye-Fi cards are now being bundled with digital cameras at Wal-Mart.com, and will be available at Best Buy stores starting October 5.

What do you think about the ability to add the features you want to Eye-Fi cards? Click Comment to tell us what you think.