Harry's Blog

I have one of these - Canon EOS 50D Digital SLR Camera. It's a brilliant camera, rugged, packed with features and has very good image quality.

But I'm thinking of selling it and getting one of these - a Sony SLT-A55V. This is a very high tech camera which ditches the traditional optical viewfinder for an electronic one. This has many traditional photographers crossing themselves and reaching for the garlic, but for me it has many plus points.

My eyesight is pretty poor and I often struggle when using optical viewfinders because even on very good cameras like the EOS 50D they aren't particularly bright. This makes it harder for me to judge composition and more importantly focus.

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I love living here in Dorset, it means that not going to the beach doesn't involve being stuck in a caravan in the minging weather.

I must admit that I've fallen out of love with photography this year. Being busy with our new addition (the wonderful baby Will) limited my time for the hobby and over time I've become somewhat disillusioned with it. It's not helped that none of my recent pictures have been any good and people have told me so. You need some encouragement to keep up with learning a new hobby - when you get the opposite it can take the wind from your sails.

To be honest if wifey would let me I'd probably put my DSLR on Ebay tomorrow because I'd rather the cash than something I didn't really use. I've been considering selling the DSLR and just relying on my SLR film camera. I've sold one 1.6x crop lens today and have another I could sell. Leaving my best lens for the film camera.

Would that be mad? Probably. Though would fit in my long term goal of buying a full frame DSLR should my love of the hobby return. I'm just starting to feel the love coming back. Not from playing with my very expensive DSLR, no, by messing around with the Vignette app on my new phone and using my film SLR.

Taken with Vignette on a HTC Desire phone.

The Photography Monthly magazine redesign is truly awful. Hardly any content now (I think they must have sacked most of the team) and what remains is presented in huge text to hide its brevity - like a magazine for primary school children. Used to be a great magazine - just a few months ago. No I won't be renewing my subscription.

The last few issues that have popped through my letterbox have been absolutely dire. If you were willing to actually read every word I think it'd probably take you 15 minutes. There is very little in there worth looking at.

Grumpy Bob has gone, for example.

It was the only photo magazine I subscribed to and it is now a shadow of its former seld. I keep getting emails and mail inviting me to resubscribe but I won't be wasting any more money on the magazine. A real shame - because it was once a great mag.

I snapped these few shots this evening - I've not had chance to get out and about with the lens yet. All shots were taken on a Canon EOS 50D and developed using Canon's DPP software set to the Faithful picture style. The only post processing has been to resize the images and then add a little unsharp mask.

Photos appear after the jump...

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I picked up the Tamron 10-24mm wide angle lens today to replace the Sigma 10-20mm I stupidly sold some months ago.

I decided to go for the Tamron due to the extra 4mm at the long end which means for me that'll get more use on the camera than if it was merely very wide angle only.

My first impressions of the lens are strong, it seems well built and is quick to focus. As I suspected the 24mm is very usuable indeed for more general photography - it's the equivelent of 38mm on my Canon EOS 50D.

Meanwhile at 10mm it's very wide indeed and vignetting and chromatic abberation are well controlled. I do see a little of the latter but it's easily fixed with Canon's Digital Photo Professional or DXO Optics Pro.

So far so good. I'll have a more detailed review once I put the lens through its paces pointing at some more interesting views than our back garden.

Now here's a subject you see on every photography forum. Should you record your DSLR images as RAW of JPEG files?

Photographers unlucky enough to Google the subject and end up with Ken Rockwell's nonsense will probably tell you JPEG every time, if they are fans of oversaturated cartoons.

But the truth is this. Whenever you take a picture with your DSLR the result is a RAW file. Think of this as your negative.

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I wonder if it's down to feeling somehow inferior to those photographers using film, but I've seen quite a few digital photographers recently describe their camera's memory cards as "digital film".

It is nothing of the sodding kind. It is a memory card for storing data.

Calling it "digital film" makes you sound like a wanker.

So stop it.

I never used Auto ISO on my 40D, it wasn't very well implemented. The camera would tend to stick between very conservative settings and only used a small range of the available ISO settings anyway.

However I have used Auto ISO on my Canon EOS 50D in the last week and am really pleased with it. My camera gets two uses - 1, as a creative tool, 2, as a way of snapping the usual family pictures one does when out and about.

The second mode, armed with a Sigma 18-200mm DC OS, the Auto ISO has been really useful. We took the kids to Westbay harbour (in Dorset) and there were plenty of changes of subject and lighting that made the Auto ISO rather useful - especially with a slow-ish lens which has big changes of widest aperture.

What impressed me most was that the 50D tried to keep the ISO as low as possible rather than just pumping it up to 800 or 1600 and leaving it there. Taking some pictures of the children playing outside as the sun set had the camera trying ISO 100 when possible and only one 1600 shot. And as most 50D users have actually discovered, in good light ISO 1600 pictures look fantastic.

So yes, colour me impressed. I've definitely had a change of heart where Auto ISO is concerned. And while not a feature I'd use when composing more creative shots - when in "walkaround" mode it works very well indeed.

I popped into the Kingston branch of Jessops yesterday and saw that the Canon 50D Body Only was listed for £950.

That's £130 more than I paid for mine a month or so ago.

I understand the gap between the Yen and Pound is resulting in prices of bodies and lenses go up over here but at these prices who on earth is going to buy?

Canon EOS 50D Canon's latest 1.6x prosumer crop camera certainly has been controversial, partly due to early reviews which used Adobe Camera RAW to develop the files. That version of ACR gave a poor impression of the 50D's RAW files when in fact the camera is much more capable as users of better RAW software such as Digital Photo Professional and DXO Optics Pro have discovered. I'll be writing a full review of the camera over the next week or so. Lenses

Sigma AF18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC Optical Stabilizer This Sigma lens is a good walk-around piece of glass for when you may be on vacation or not able to carry much equipment around with you. It's certainly not the best lens for optical quality, but what it lacks in quality at times it makes up in versatility. The optical stabilisation works brilliantly to help you get hand-held shots in low light and at long focal lengths. If you're making the step up from a basic kit lens and want just one good all-round lens this is a good place to start.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Known by many photographers as the "nifty fifty" this is one lens every Canon SLR owner should have in their kit bag. The cheap and cheerful plastic-cased lens is very fast - making it ideal for low light - and the f1.8 aperture also makes for great creative use of depth of field. You really can't go wrong with this lens as it packs more punch that its price would have you believe.

Sigma 105mm f2.8 EX DG Macro The Sigma 105mm is an excellent Macro camera offering a 1:1 magnification ratio, but it's also a great fast indoor portrait lens. The f2.8 aperture means you can get great shots in lower light without using a flash and the reach of 105mm on a crop camera such as a 400D or 50D means you can grab candid shots from across a room. The focus limit switch can be a pain until you get used to it, as is the push-pull focus ring, but the results of the great optics more than make up from a few usability issues.

Tamron AF 17-50mm F2.8 XR Di II LD Aspherical (IF) The Tamron 17-50mm is a real unsung hero of a lens. The optical quality is on a par with many lenses that cost twice as much and the fast f2.8 aperture makes it very useful indoors without a flash as well as out and about. 17mm is pretty wide even on a crop camera and this makes the lens and ideal walk-around when snapping landscape images. Flash Canon EOS Speedlite 430EX flash unit Accessories Canon BG-E2N Battery Grip For EOS 20D, 30D, 40D & 50D

You ever have those days where you come home with your camera and you look at the 80 or so shots on the card and not a single one is worth uploading to Flickr or even showing anyone?

That's how my morning went. We took the kids for a walk to Bushy Park and onwards to Hampton Court palace. The sky was grey, the light terrible and to make matters worse I took the wrong lens with me.

I was using the Sigma 18-200mm DC OS which can be surprisingly sharp at times. But out and about today I took a lot of very dull badly focussed shots. The autofocus in the lens prefers sunny days and today's dull light gave this slow - but very useful - lens nothing to work with.

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I've just read an interesting article over at bobatkins.com about the controversy surrounding the 15MP sensor in the new Canon EOS 50D Camera. There's been a lot of nonsense talked about this new sensor - especially about diffraction. And Bob has succinctly cut through the BS.

So, yes, stopping down past f8 with the EOS 50D might well result in lower image resolution. The important omission is that stopping down an EOS 40D, a Digital Rebel XT, a Nikon D300 or a Nikon D90 past f8 would result in exactly the same thing! Not only that, but the camera with the highest resolution would be sharper at f8. So, for example, the 50D image would be sharper than the 40D image...

...I've even seen some people suggest that images from the 50D will be less sharp than those of the 40D with most lenses. I'm not quite sure of the "logic" they have used in reaching that conclusion, but they got there somehow!

Again these "deductions" are completely wrong. The fact is that the higher resolution of the 50D will result in higher resolution, sharper, images than those from the 40D whatever lens you use. Doesn't matter if it's the pretty average "all plastic kit zoom" shot wide open or a super sharp lens like the EF 135/2.0L shot at f8. The higher resolution sensor of the EOS 50D will result in sharper images in both cases.

You can read the whole thing over at bobatkins.com. And there's some interesting real world proof of this at a blog called Serious Amateur Photography here and here.