Canon’s introducing new Firmware to 5D Mark II to give it full manual control in movie mode – http://www.usa.canon.com/app/emails/eosmay095dmii/?WT.mc_id=EM0905EO04002.

The manual mode was sorely missing from the camera, causing those who wanted to shoot video and control their aperture settings to find 3-party lenses to mount on to their camera bodies. This is going to make it a lot easier to utilize this feature. It’s still going to be non-trivial for the novice user given the need to put it on a tripod an manual focus. An the “indie” film buffs will whine still as to why it shoots at 30fps rather than 24….

Firmware is available next week (2 Jun 2009). I’ll wait a few days before installing, though.

Recently, I was going through my photo collection within Lightroom and came across this image I took a couple of years ago at the Monterey Aquarium. It’s not necessarily good or bad, but now that’s two years later, I’m realizing that there are some very quick changes that I can do to enhance it:

So, here’s how I re-processed it:

1. Used Lightroom 2.3 instead of 1.x. The improved processing engine (esp for noise) made an immediate difference.
2. Next, I brought it into Photoshop CS3 and applied Imagenomic’s Noiseware at default settings. (At a recent workshop, I really picked up how important it is to use noise reduction early in the process as it minimizes the noise artifacts from being magnified during later processing.
3. Third, I cloned out the tentacles and jellyfish along the left hand side. I also went through and cleaned up various spots (either junk on the window, my lens, my sensor, or “stuff” in the water). This comes back to looking at what’s the subject of the photo – which is the primary jellyfish swimming down from the upper left. Once that’s identified, subtract what’s not needed to simplify the image. I choose to keep the other jelly fish in the background to give it a sense of depth. I also like how the curve of the background jellyfish “frames” the subject.
4. Finally, I sharpened the image with a high-pass sharpen action

So here’s the final version now:

Your thoughts?

I spent last week taking a photography workshop in the North Carolina Outer Banks.

Although parts of the workshop left something to be desired, overall it was a great experience.  I got to meet some new friends (John, Scott, Joseph, Davis) as well renew a friendship (Bart) with someone I took a workshop with last year.   (I’ll talk about the workshop experience in a later post).

Below a Google map of various places I’ve discovered to photography whether it be through the DLWS Workshop, the Carolinas’ Nature Photographers Association (CNPA), or my own research:

View Outer Banks Photography Locations in a larger map

In addition to these locations, there’s always other standard things to be found along the coast: (some of these items are more desirable than others)

• Beach – people, crowds, kite flying, fishing
• “Culture” – tourist traps, minature golf courses,
• Wave abstracts

In the first stage of the centennial Giro d’Italia, it was basically 3 american-related teams that topped the results: Team Columbia-Highroad, Garmin-Slipstream, and Astana.  Although, this is only a small stage, it continues to show how far americans have come in this traditionally european dominated sport.

For those in the United States, the race can followed live on the Internet on Universal Sports at http://www.universalsports.com

I’ve also used Cycling News’ live coverage to follow races – (http://www.cyclingnews.com).