Fort DeSoto Morning In-the-Field Workshop
Fort DeSoto In-the-field Workshop: FEB 25. Pre-dawn -10:30am. Limit 16/openings: 10. Includes a great working lunch: $275.
On Monday morning, February 25, Denise Ippolito and I will be co-leading a morning In-the-field Workshop at Fort DeSoto, south of St. Petersburg, FL. We should get to photograph a variety of very tame herons, egrets, gulls, terns, and shorebirds. Spoonbills possible. There will be lots of individual and small group instruction. We will cover exposure and histograms, seeing the situation, creating sharp images, and lots more. Each registrant will have a personalized gear and set-up check. The more questions you ask, the more you will learn.
A great working lunch at the Sea Porch Café on St. Petersburg Beach is included. All are invited to bring a laptop along for image sharing at lunch. After the workshop, all are invited to send us three 1024 wide or 800 tall JPEGs for critiquing. Call 1-863-692-0906 to register or send us a Paypal. Either way, be sure to note that the payment is for the Fort DeSoto In-the-Field Workshop.
Weekend Creative Nature Photography Seminar, Tampa, FL: February 23 & 24, 2013: $149 Limit: 50/Openings: 4
Best to register soon as there are just 4 seats left. The In-the-field Workshop above follows the Weekend Creative Nature Photography Seminar. You are invited to join Denise Ippolito and me on the weekend of February 23-24 on the outskirts of Tampa, FL for a great weekend of fun and learning. Learn to improve your photography skills, your skill at designing images in the field, your creative vision, and your image optimization skills. Sunday critiquing session. Click here for additional details and the complete schedule.
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Great Black-backed Gull head and shoulders portrait, from the January Barnegat Jetty IPT with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus lens, the Canon 1.4x EF Extender III (teleconverter), and the Canon EOS-1D X digital SLR . ISO 400. Evaluative metering -2/3 stop: 1/2000 sec. at f/8 in Manual mode. This is the first bird that we encountered on the first afternoon of the IPT so we stopped to go over some exposure basics. As the light was so bright I was sort of surprised that I wound up with a rather nice image. Reminder: in bright sun, it is more important than ever to point your shadow at the subject. |
EOS-1D X News: It Was All My Fault
Well, Almost All My Fault…
In the “Shooting Blanks: Do As I Say, Not As I Do” blog post here, I wrote, I am still not sure how that happened, but, it happened.” The next day I received an e-mail from Doug Howell suggesting that I might have inadvertently pressed the Card/Image size selection button on the left rear of the back of the camera and then rotated the thumb wheel. I asked that Doug post his e-mail as a comment on the blog but he misunderstood and posted it on BPN in the gear forum. Shortly thereafter I received several e-mails, the first from Jeff Rugg, advising that I check out the January 22, 2013 Canon Rumors post here.
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This is the symbol for the Card/Image size selection button. It is located on the left rear of the back of the camera next to the small, lower LCD screen. |
An Error in My Thinking…
When I first began working on this blog post I remembered attempting to change the color temperature when we were photographing the sunrise on the morning of Saturday, February 19 and thought that that might have been when my problems started as on the 1D Mark IV you can change the color temperature via a button below the smaller of the two LCDs.
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This Black-capped Chickadee image was created with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus lens, the Canon 1.4x EF Extender III (teleconverter), and the Canon EOS-1D X digital SLR . ISO 800. Evaluative metering -1 stop: 1/200 sec. at f/10 in Av mode. Why Av mode here? The light was changing constantly from bright sunny to cloudy and I found it easier to go from -1 stop when it was cloudy to -1 1/3 stops when the sun came out rather than having to make major changes to both aperture and shutter speed whenever the lighting conditions changed…. |
The Last RAW File
But when I went into my image folder for Thursday January 17, the day that Denise and I went to Elizabeth A. Morton NWR in Noyac, NY, I discovered exactly when the M2 JPEG problem began. The image above is from a RAW file that I created at 10:15:55 am.
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This Downy Woodpecker image was created with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus lens, the Canon 1.4x EF Extender III (teleconverter), and the Canon EOS-1D X digital SLR . ISO 800. Evaluative metering -1 1/3 stops: 1/400 sec. at f/10 in Av mode. Though it does not seem so it is likely that the light was a bit stronger when I made this image than when I made the chickadee image above. |
The First M2 JPEG
This is the very first M2 JPEG that I created. The image was made at 10:18:37, exactly 2 minutes and 42 seconds after I created the chickadee image. It was then crystal clear that I had correctly re-loaded the correct 1D X camera settings to the body that had been repaired and that I had indeed inadvertently changed the image size myself. Try as I might, I do not remember trying to change the color temperature or doing anything else that might have caused the problem. As I said, “inadvertently….”
The Good News
It looks as if a new firmware for the Canon EOS-1D X, Firmware 1.2.1, will be released to the public online on the evening of the January 29, 2013. All will be able to access it here by clicking on the Drivers and Software tab and following the directions. The new firmware will allow users to disable the Image size selection button.
Typos
On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂
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Any clue/hint on what else the firmware upgrade will contain beside disabling the image size?
Also, why on earth is it taking months and months for the firmware for the 5D3? I realize they want to get it right, but it doesn’t seem like rocket science.
mark
Canon wants to give people time to buy more 1DXs before making the 5DIII too appealing.
🙂
If you follow the Canon Rumors link above the have related info but the additional stuff is pretty much insignificant. No clue on the 5D III firmware. I would love it too….
For those rear buttons near the lcd at least, i think it was unwise for Canon to move away from the old 1Dmk2 way of doing things where you have to hold down the button and move the wheel rather than press first and then the wheel is activated for a while. Especially with the image size/type button that’s not used very often.
An option to have the buttons behave like that would be easy to impliment and better than having it either disabled or too easy to change i feel!
Very helpful, Artie. Too bad Canon does not provide this info.
Just out of curiosity, anybody know why this is called the EOS-1D X
and not something like EOS-1D Mark V or EOS-1D V?
Doug
Hey, Doug, I’ve seen a lot of discussion of this naming matter elsewhere, and I have two thoughts. One is that some of Canon’s camera names, especially for the United States, are just so weird that it’s not worth trying to figure them out (e.g., XTi then XSi then T1i then T2i.) And how does one figure out the naming logic of the 7D, 6D, and 5D? The second thought is that the 1DX isn’t a direct continuation of any previous Canon line. The 1D series was APS-H (1.3 crop) and very fast; the 1Ds series was full frame, high-resolution, and much slower. 1D Mark V would imply that the camera is a successor to the 1D Mark IV, and this camera is different. But I’m not sure whether it matters; it seems to be a wonderful camera (a rose is a rose…).
Thanks David. I seem to remember the ‘not a direct continuation’ now. But that would leave me with another question. If that was true, then why discontinue the Mark IV? This could go on and on 🙂 Like you said, weird.
I would ask Fujio Mitarai, the Chairman and CEO, but he probably doesn’t even know 🙂
Doug
Canon gave two official explanations for the naming of the 1D X during the initial release. They said the X stood for the cross-over or amalgamation of the two previous 1 series lines into one line (1D and 1Ds). They also said the roman numeral X=10 stood for it being the 10th professional camera starting back at the F1 from the 70s.
Art, thanks for the heads-up on the firmware update for the 1D X. I have it in my calendar.
I’m glad you got to the bottom of it Arthur. Sadly, we live to learn…!
Happily I live to learn :). On the grand scale of things two sessions of M@ JPEGs is no great ordeal….
😀