Howdy all! My apologies for not posting for awhile. Photography has been kind of slow, and there's always school. Anyways, I back with a new camera and hopefully a lot more images!

I've officially upgraded to the full-frame Canon 5D Mark II. I am also adding the 24-105 f/4L to the mix, which is proving to be an excellent full frame walk-around lens. I will try to give my impressions of the 5D MkII in upcoming posts. For now, all I can say is full frame is wonderful, and 21 million little dots at your disposal is a heck of a lot. The detail this thing can resolve (with decent glass) is unreal!

I am also starting to use Digital Photo Professional, Canon's proprietary software. Even after camera calibration, Adobe Camera Raw is unable to resolve the reds/oranges correctly. I will still use ACR to process some images, but I am definitely using DPP as the first step in my photography workflow.

My workflow now looks something like this:

1. Convert Raw to 16 bit TIFF in DPP (including noise reduction, chromatic aberration correction, lens correction (distortion and illumination), white balance, curves, and most color adjustments). DPP doesn't display color correctly, but the final output result is much better.

2. Open TIFF in ACR to perform any additional curve adjustments (now that I can see the colors correctly) and spot removal, etc.

3. Open in Photoshop to perform any further adjustments or save as a JPEG (and sometimes another TIFF). (usually just the latter).

It's all very cumbersome (especially the DPP), but the results are worth it for images where reds/oranges are prominent or lens distortion correction is needed.

And now finally, some quick info about the image. I used a circular polarizer to bring out the sky, and the image was also vertically cropped. I shot this with Abe last weekend in Scottsdale.

categories: architecture