ayn blog

I’ve had the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM for years, it is one of the sharpest lenses out there, and it shoots 1:1 macro. I shoot commercial product photography professionally, so the 100/2.8 macro was the lens with which I made probably more than 80% of my income from photography. I however only used that lens for work, but almost never for personal work. I shot a couple of macro shots to test out the lens when I first got it, it was a fine lens but the aperture was not round enough, so the out of focus area was too harsh for my liking. It worked fine for product closeups, but for anything else the harsh bokeh really bothered me, so the lens never left my studio since I got it.

Canon introduced an L version of this lens, it does 1:1 macro, but has the new IS system that provides up to 5 stops of stabilization, the aperture is also near-round, so it yeilds similar soft and dreamy bokeh like my other lenses. I looked on eBay and was surprised to find out that I could easily sell my 100/2.8 with the hood for around $500, so that means it will only costs about $500 to upgrade, which I think is well worth it. The improvements will make me want to take the lens out of the studio and have fun with it. Amazon has this lens for about $1k, which is an amazing deal IMO. I brought it to the SF botanical garden for a test drive, it performed as expected: much smoother transition between in and out of focus areas, way smoother bokeh, the MTF graphs comparison shows that it is even sharper, but pretty much the whole graph is under the Nyquist frequency of the 5D Mark II so I don’t think anyone can really tell the difference. It is tack sharp for sure though. I accidentally shut off the IS so I didn’t get to test it much, I was able to take test portraits without camera shake at around 1/15 the night before, at 1:1 it will have to give a few more stops to be safe.

Some shots from the botanical garden:

f/4, 1/1000s

f/3.5, 1/1250s

f/3.2, 1/640s

This lens is pretty inexpensive for what it offers, other than the crazy MPE, which is very specialized and it’s pretty much a microscope, the 100L is the best macro lens for Canon right now. The AF is very fast, f/2.8 at 100mm is pretty bright, and it is tack sharp at wide open. The lens also makes a really good portrait lens, not quite as insane as the 85L, but it is half the price and it does 1:1 macro. I would definitely recommend getting this over the non-L version of the 100/2.8 macro. The non-L version is $599 and the hood is about $40, so the 100L is only about $360 more, but you get round-aperture, amazing IS, weather seal, an amazing lens hood (best Canon lens hood I’ve seen), as well as a lens bag! Definitely worth the extra $360 IMO. If you have a full frame body and are ready to buy your first L lens, I’d say forget the 24-70L, get the 100L, it is a much cooler lens to have.

You can pick one up at Amazon, btw, the price on Amazon has been fluctuating between $1060 to $1005, if the current price is too high, you should be able to wait a couple of days for it to drop back down to about $1005:

85/1.2L II vs 24-70/2.8L

The top reasons I chose Canon was because of insane L primes, out of all the lenses out there, the one I’d always wanted was the 85L, as it is arguably the best lens for portraits. The price of this lens has gone up over the years, especially after Canon introduced the Mark II version. Recently the price went down a little bit, so I picked it up soon as that happened. After shooting with it for a few weeks, all I can say is that I should’ve bought this lens long time ago.

The lens however is not for everyone, it is expensive, heavy, large, AF is relatively slow if you’re used to other fast L primes and zooms. The minimum focusing distance is 0.95 meter, which is probably farther than what you’re used to. It is also a very difficult lens to use if you don’t have strict shooting discipline. Shooting anywhere close to wide open requires expert focusing techniques, especially if you have a camera with AF-points pattern that doesn’t make sense for portraits; focus-and-recompose is not an option when operating with an inch of depth of field. But if you know what you’re dealing with, this is one amazing lens. Some images I shot with the 85L:

f/1.8 1/2000s with B+W ND4 filter

f/1.4 1/100s

f/1.2 1/500s

5D Mark II, 85/1.2L II, f/1.2, 1/50s, ISO 6400

f/1.6

f/1.6

f/1.8 1/3200s, B+W ND4 filter

f/1.4 1/800s, B+W ND4 filter

Before I got in the world of L primes I thought a fullframe body with a 24-70/2.8L is a really good setup for serious photographers. But after shooting with L primes, I can say that the 24-70 is not even close to the sharpness, contrast, and quality (especially bokeh softness) of the 50L and 85L. Now, for the serious photographers, I think the perfect Canon starter “kit” is the 50/1.2L with a full frame body. With foot works, it is pretty much a 24-70, only much faster and better image quality. I am seriously considering selling my 24-70L for a 35L now. I do like the 24mm end though, but the 24L is not nearly as good as the 35L. If I didn’t have the 85L I would get the 50L for sure, but they’re a bit too close and expensive to own both. I also upgraded my 100/2.8 Macro USM to the new L version with IS, will talk about that in my next post.

btw, the 85L is very cheap right now, lowest price for pretty much the past year thanks to an instant rebate:

I returned the Canon G11 and got the Panasonic LX3. Quick thoughts on the LX3:

• very small for a highend P&S
• AF, shutter, and operation lags were better, but still not as quick as my Fuji f50fd
• as expected, the lens on the LX3 was even better than that of the G11, and it’s also very fast, f/2 to f/2.8 in the whole range
• wideangle is amazing, optical zoom is not quite long enough, but that’s not a huge problem for me, I’d rather have a fixed lens.

After about 300 frames, and a few 720p videos, I liked it, but not enough to keep it, so back Amazon it went.

Some LX3 snaps:

you can find all my LX3 snaps here: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=lx3&w=68826320%40N00

The images are still very P&S like, it’s very hard to have any background separation on the camera, so I decided to return it and spend the money to upgrade my Canon 100/2.8 macro USM to the new 100L IS version. (samples from that lens in a later post). The Leica X1 samples I’ve seen have also been very disappointing, at this point I’ve given up on getting a small digital for now. I looked at the GF1 and it’s nice, but the lenses are terrible, the bokeh is so harsh that it reminds me of cheap Canon lenses.

If you still wanna pick up the LX3 or the GF1, you can get them here:

I was pretty excited when Canon announced the Canon PowerShot G11. My SLR rig is too large, and I want a decent walk-around camera. The G11, from the specs, seems to fit the criterias for a DMD (decisive moment digital).

You can tell the lens on the G11 is incredible from the samples at the Canon Japan site. The decreased pixel count is great as that means lower (better) pixel density – 23MP/cm² – which should translate to better noise performance in high ISO settings. Noise control is very important to me, especially with a P&S. Built-in flash almost never yield decent shots, it is best to turn flash off when shooting indoor. In fact, I only use it for fill flash, and to get catch lights in the eyes, not as a primary light source.

I was really anxious to pick up a G11, I checked Amazon daily for weeks. When I learned that Best Buy had them in stock, I immediately went to check it out. I played with their demo unit in store, it was fairly obvious that the noise performance wasn’t great from playback shots on the LCD. The next day I found a 10% coupon, that made Best Buy’s price comparable to ordering online. Knowing that American Express would refund my restocking fee if I want to return it, I went back and picked one up.

I’ve had the G11 for 5 days, shot around 500 frames. I am not 100% happy satisfied with it, and I haven’t decided if I’m keeping it. Some quick thoughts on this camera:

Pros

• Great lens, the lens is one of the best I’ve seen in a P&S, and I would say it’s better than crappy “kit lens” that come with most entry-level D-SLRs. The G11 is actually very sharp at wide open aperture
• Wide angle, pretty useful when shooting in tight spaces. It also shoots great WA macro shots, something you really need a P&S for
• It shoots RAW, this gives me more flexibility in post-processing
• Hotshoe for flash! I can mount a Canon Speedlite on it and the camera does accurate E-TTL flash metering. It works very well with bounced flash as well. The hotshot also allows syncing to strobes in studio with PocketWizards and other remote triggering devices. The following shot was done with a bounced 580EX II:

G11, ISO 100, 6.1mm, f/2.8, 1/60s

G11 + 580EX II

side profile of camera with 580EX II attached

• Manual controls, this is pretty important to me, the G11, like most highend P&S, allows full manual controls of aperture, shutter speed, and focus
• Image Stabilization works well
• Swivel screen is nice, not because I like to take pictures of myself, but because I can flip it around to protect the screen

• Control knobs for ISO settings, EV compensation, and shooting modes. They allow quick adjustments without having to go through the menu, they also feel really solid

• Noise control in JPEGs is decent (more on this later)
• Metering is very accurate, and it even has a spotmeter
• Great battery life, after a few days of decent use the battery is still full

Cons

• NOISE!! Anything above ISO 800 is unusable IMO, especially in RAW. This is very disappointing, I expected much better noise control from this sensor – maybe my expectation is unrealistic. JPEGs are clearner because the camera has hardware noise reduction, so I shoot RAW+JPEG
• Weight! Very solid construction, but heavy for a P&S, it is also large enough that it won’t fit in jeans pockets (unless you want sick stretch and fades)
• Price. MSRP is $500, and street prices are higher than the Panasonic LX3 right now, for a bit more I could get the DLUX4, both of these got a even better lens!
• The viewfinder is absolutely useless, I don’t even see AF points or even just a bracket in there
• Slow AF, maybe it’s fast for a P&S, but AF and response time is not even close to what I’m used to, and not much faster than the SD series P&S
• Variable aperture, I hate zoom lenses with variable aperture
• It would be nice to have a front adjustment ring around the lens like the S90, that would be useful for manual focusing
• AF assist light, it is on by default, and is very annoying
• Video capability is a joke, for $500, it really should do HD videos

Some test shots with the G11

G11, 6.1mm, f/8, 1/200s, ISO 80

G11, 12mm, f/8, 1/125s, ISO 125

G11, 6.1mm, f/2.8, ISO 80

G11, 30.5mm, f/4.5, 1/100s, ISO 800

G11, 6.1mm, f/3.2, 1/60s, ISO 640

By the way, Amazon now has it in stock:

If you’re a pro/semi-pro photographer and love Flickr, I think you will love Pullfolio. Pullfolio helps you create professional portfolio sites using photos in your Flickr account by tag(s) or photosets. For example, you can setup your photography site with these portfolios:

• Wedding – it pulls all photos that are tagged pullfolio and wedding (or whatever tag(s) you specified when you configure the portfolio) from your Flickr account
• Portraits – it pulls all photos from your portraits photoset on Flickr

You get the idea. You can also enter your blog URL, bio, and contact info, and they will be included on your site. You can also choose from a few themes. If you upgrade to the Pro subscription for just $15 a month, you will be able to point your domain to the site, add your analytics code for tracking, and if you want to get your hands dirty, you have the ability to completely customize your site. We plan to partner with designers to provide more themes, and if you need a designer, we can provide referrals to ones who understand how our themes work.

When you upload new photos to Flickr, you will just have to tag them or add them to a photoset and your portfolio website will have the new photos automatically.

You can check out my photography site to get an idea of how it works. I still have to setup my own portfolios properly though.

If this sounds like it’s something you want, I am giving out 100 invites, here’s a direct link to signup for our private beta:

http://pullfolio.com/invite/aynblog

Each account also comes with 5 additional invites upon signup.

A bit of background: as a heavy Flickr user, I’ve always wanted a photography site that pulls photos from my Flickr account. This way I can upload my photos to Flickr with the right tags or photoset, and it will automatically show up at my photography site. After not having a proper photography site for more than 3 years, there still isn’t a service out there that does what I want. It’s also quite shocking that I was able to get gigs by networking and my Flickr photostream (or “collections” rather) without a website. When Ray and I were brainstorming ideas of what to build, I selfishly suggested this idea. We got a prototype working within 2 weeks, however, to turn the idea into a real product that supports many users, themes, subscriptions, custom domains, while using behavior-driven development with 100% test coverage, was a significant effort.

Feel free to post any feedback at our UserVoice feedback forum. You can follow Pullfolio on Twitter to get updates on new features.

I have a 500GB MyPassport drive I use to clone my Mac’s internal drive, it’s plugged into one of the USB ports behind my Apple Cinema Display. After I eject/un-mount the drive I don’t want to unplug and re-plug the USB cable to re-mount the drive, I can re-mount it in Disk Utility, but that’s still kindda annoying, so I looked and here’s how you do it in the command line.

When you have the drive mounted, do a df to see what the device is:

[ProBert:~] ayn% df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   976101344 427449800 548139544    44%    /
devfs                220       220         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%    /home
afp_0TT7Xo1noyS900m5Am0Pyetl-1.2d000017 1949330784 1365867776 583463008    71%    /Volumes/Time Capsule
/dev/disk2s2                            1949330720 1365933248 583397472    71%    /Volumes/Backup of ProBert
/dev/disk1s3   976510944 427839352 548671592    44%    /Volumes/AYN MBP Clone

The device name is /dev/disk1s3 in my case. After that, you can mount and un-mount in Terminal easily by doing this:

[ProBert:~] ayn% diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s3
Volume AYN MBP Clone on disk1s3 unmounted
[ProBert:~] ayn% df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   976101344 427449672 548139672    44%    /
devfs                221       221         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%    /home
afp_0TT7Xo1noyS900m5Am0Pyetl-1.2d000017 1949330784 1365867776 583463008    71%    /Volumes/Time Capsule
/dev/disk2s2                            1949330720 1365933248 583397472    71%    /Volumes/Backup of ProBert
[ProBert:~] ayn% diskutil mount /dev/disk1s3
Volume AYN MBP Clone on /dev/disk1s3 mounted
[ProBert:~] ayn% df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  204Gi  261Gi    44%    /
devfs          111Ki  111Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /home
afp_0TT7Xo1noyS900m5Am0Pyetl-1.2d000017 1949330784 1365867776 583463008    71%    /Volumes/Time Capsule
/dev/disk2s2                            1949330720 1365933248 583397472    71%    /Volumes/Backup of ProBert
afp_0TT7Xo1noyS900m5Am0Pyetl-1.2d000017  930Gi  651Gi  278Gi    71%    /Volumes/Time Capsule
/dev/disk2s2                             930Gi  651Gi  278Gi    71%    /Volumes/Backup of ProBert
/dev/disk1s3   466Gi  204Gi  262Gi    44%    /Volumes/AYN MBP Clone

After Apple announced the unibody MacBook Pro about a year ago, I walked into the San Francisco Apple Store that night just to “check them out”, of course, I walked out with one. I’d owned a large number of Apple products and I kindda knew getting one of the first badge of a brand new design was probably not the best idea, but the unibody construction was just too cool to pass up at the time. Plus, Apple did the right thing in the past when our “dual-USB” iBook G3 failed.

The first batch of the “Late 2008″ unibody MacBook Pros, and I think MacBooks as well, have a fairly common screen flicker problem. If you google “macbook pro screen flicker” you will find a ton of information at various forums about this issue. It bothered me some, but it wasn’t really that bad. However, after upgarding to Snow Leopard, the problem got MUCH worse. So bad that I made an appointment at the Genius Bar to get it looked at. The flickering happens pretty often, and even though I am usually plugged into an external monitor and only use the MBP’s display as an “extended desktop” display, the flickers bothered the hell out of me even in my peripheral vision.

When I got to the genius bar this morning, of course the machine wasn’t flickering at all, I explained that it had been widely reported online, and told him the facts like it does not happen with the discrete video card, and only happens on the built-in display, not external monitor. The genius then said since it didn’t happen on the external display it must not be the graphics card, I was like, well, I’m not sure about that and probably wouldn’t rule out the graphics card because of that. He was being pretty helpful and offered to take the machine in and have someone research the knowledge base and see if there was a fix for it. I agreed and said I’d leave the machine there for the day and would pick it up before they close.

At around 6pm a guy from the store called, and told me that he had seen the problem before on the early unibody laptops, but there isn’t a known fix for it. He said he had submitted the information to engineering and he was hopeful that there will be some kindda fix later, and if after a couple of months there was still not one then I could bring it back and talk to a manager and see what he would be able to do for me. He said since I reported this problem now, even if I don’t get AppleCare they would still be able to take care of it after the 1-year mark. I thought that was pretty reasonable so that’s what I’ll do with that machine. (I haven’t had the best luck with genius bar or Apple products lately, btw)

After my genius appointment this morning I went and looked at the antiglare MacBook Pros, the glossy screen had always bothered me, it pretty much renders the machine unusable in a lot of conditions, and it’s pretty scary when you have to do things like edit color photos. I work from coffeeshops pretty often and the glossy screen absolutely sucks when there are windows or just when using the machine any time except at night. After thinking about it for half a day and checking out resale values of my other macs on eBay, I decided to get another 15″ with the antiglare display, and I’ll keep the glossy one around in hope for a fix later, and I’ll sell my older (10/2008 rev) MacBook Pro. That machine is in really good shape, but we just don’t need 3 macs. It’s pretty cool how the MacBook Pros got so much cheaper now, I remember my first PowerBook was close to $3k, my first MBP was $2k but I got the “lowend” version, my first unibody was $2.5k, now you can get a 17″ for under that! Pretty amazing.

Anyway, the main reason I felt like blogging about this was that while I was migrating data between machines, I found some information I can add to the screen flicker issue:

• the screen flickered when I had the machine in Target Disk Mode, this means the problem is most likely not software related, when in TDM the OS isn’t even loaded
• the flickering happened during Snow Leopard clean install, again, the full OS X was not loaded when I booted to the install DVD directly (by holding option key when machine starts up and choosing the DVD)

So I can pretty much eliminate any user or even OS software from plausible causes. I really hope a EFI/firmware upgrade would fix it, there might be a loose connection somewhere, but I highly doubt that. Worst case it will be a faulty graphics chipset (it’s  not uncommon to have yield problems), that would require a logicboard replacement, but a few people posted that the issue remained after they had their logicboards replaced. If Apple doesn’t acknowledge this problem and come up with an official fix, a class action lawsuit for something like this is not unheard of (right? @seoulfully I’m looking at you).

In case you’re wondering, no, I have not seen any screen flicker on my new MBP. If I ever see one I will be very upset. btw, I really like the silver bezel around the matte display:

I participated in last weekend’s RailsRumble, my first time “rumbling”, it was a pretty awesome experience. Ray’s team at Intridea had an opening and he asked if I wanted to join last week, I was like, why not. I’ve been doing paired coding with Ray for years now and I know we can easily pull it off in 48 hours. We also had Doug March, an awesome designer who helped with the design and layout of the app. Check out our app: MovieTwitvia

I don’t really have anything profound to say about the whole experience, but a few random things:

• Linode was awesome, I requested to install and boot to Ubuntu jaunty and I was able to ssh in pretty much instantly
• It took a while to get Github access, but that didn’t stop us to git init and start hacking
• I used Sprinkle to setup our Passenger stack, with a few small exceptions it worked flawlessly, we were able to `cap deploy` within half hour of the start of the competition. I thought about trying deprec but at the time of server setup I didn’t have Rails app setup yet so I went with Sprinkle, which I’ve used quite extensively at Inigral
• since our app uses Twitter authentication, I used mbleigh’s twitter app template, I had issues with one of his plugins in the past so I was uneasy using it, but I have to say it worked great for us
• We used Pivotal Tracker and planned out the features before the app. They fall nicely into Cucumber features after we started coding. Ray and I wrote Cucumber features and steps for all our model codes. We didn’t follow through with integration testing, mocking all that API stuff would’ve been a bit of a pain, and our app is pretty simple
• (pickler didn’t work for me, I think it doesn’t work with the version of Cucumber I used)
• Ray and I coded til 7am my time Saturday night (or Sunday morning), at that time our app was pretty much done, only major thing we had to do was to put in the reply box so users can reply to the question on our site directly. We were pretty pumped up and thought about working for a few more hours, but decided that it was probably better to get a few hours of sleep, so we can hack with better focus and more energy til deadline. It was a good decision, I got up at around 10:30 and hacked out that reply box pretty quickly
• I actually had to go to tomales bay state park for a BBQ so I had to leave at 2pm California time, Ray and Doug took care of the final touches and the verification steps, it was nice to have finished all features way ahead of time and we were able to fix bugs and try out the sites with a few friends before the end of the competition
• I found one bug in the code this afternoon, it’s very minor and probably won’t matter unless we get more than a certain number of replies for a given question

That’s basically all I have to say right now, if we get through to the public voting round, please vote for us!

I shoot M 95% of the times, gotta use that lightmeter whenever I can, you know. But when I shot Av in the last several months, the images were often bit overexposed. I would usually check the histogram and adjust and didn’t think much of it, but it bothered me that the exposure was a bit off if I didn’t change the EV compensation myself.

I was casually shooting at a park last weekend and it dawned on me that I forgot to change the focusing screen settings to Eg-S after I upgraded the firmware. I got the Eg-S for more accurate DOF display, but it’s a much dimmer focusing screen, and it pretty much requires f/2.8 lenses to be bright enough to see. After changing the focusing screen I changed the settings in the camera so it would meter appropriately, but I guess upgrading the firmware must have reset that setting to the default factory focusing screen, so the processor thought the frame was darker than it actually was and bumped up the EV.

Now the setting is back where it should, I find myself shooting at aperture priority a little bit more.

MMM:

Ann:

Junya: