Since I bought the Canon 350D I have been shooting mainly JPG image, since RAW file became so big and filled the CF-Card so quickly. Even with an external storage device like the Vosonic 2160 the intermediate emptying of the CF-Card is somewhat impractical. In particular, when you’re traveling, you have to stay some minutes quite to let the copy complete, since you don’t want cause to much vibration while the small hard disc within the storage device is working. And another factor was, that my home operating system is Linux. While at the time there was and still is the excellent dcraw package by Dave Coffin, which provides the tool to convert the images from RAW to JPG an utility was missing to transfer EXIF data from the RAW file to the JPG file. At least I wasn’t aware of such an utility.

Just recently I took some photos under artificial light, where the automatic color balance of the camera didn’t work well enough. And the color correction of the JPG files was simply a pain. Therefore my renewed interest in the RAW format, where color correction is a much more simple process. And while surfing the Web I came across the ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This was just the tools I was missing. By executing exiftool -TagsFromFile src.cr2 dst.jpg I could transfer all the EXIF information from the RAW file to the JPG file. The current version of 5.85 seems to indicate, that the tool set is around for some time, but I wasn’t aware of it about a year ago. Now I can effectivly use RAW format again, even under Linux.

Just found this The Radiant Vista – The Daily Critique by way of this entry on the I Like Cameras blog. I find this video critiques on photos simply amazing. It explains so well, how a pro approaches a picture. You can learn a lot by watching these video sequences and how some small changes can improve a pictures.

So far I’ve watched 9 of the critiques, but I’m definitely going to watch all of them.

I’m currently in the process of fixing up some photos, I took during the somewhat belated celebration of the birthday of my 11 year old daughter with her friends. For some shots I used a flashlight and even though the flashlight is quite a bit off the axis of the lens under normal circumstances, this time due to the usage of a tele zoom and quite a distance to photographic object I still had plenty of red eye. I tried a couple of methods to remove the red eye, but I mostly found them awkward to.

After some search on the Internet, I found these two links: “Remove Red Eye — Red Eye Reduction Done Right” and “Red-Eye Elimination“. They both work according to similar principles. I like them both since they both allow for very easy corrections once you painted a bit to far. You only paint in the layer mask with either black or white. And another good thing is, that the method can be used for “The Gimp“.

“How To Remove Red Eye in Photoshop (any Version)” also works quite well.

I’ve got it since yesterdays and wow, that thing is fast. Press the button and zap, focused. I love it already. Of course the camera is bigger and heavier, in particular, when the 28-135 lens is attached.Usage is not so differently compared to the Canon G3, menus and so on. Once you have fiddled with it a bit you’ll feel at home pretty fast. Making the best use of all the provided features will take a bit of time I guess. I think the money will pay off in the end.

I bit the bullet. I made the plunge. What I actually wanted to say is, that I placed the order for a Canon 350D yesterday evening and judging from the status email I received today from the dealers, where I placed my orders, the stuff is already in it’s way. I ordered the camera with the 18-55mm lens kit, a Canon 28-135 zoom with IS and the Canon 50mm 1.8 prime lens. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the various forums to decide, what the best combination of lenses might be. I also tried to observe the patterns in the various situations, how I have been using my current Canon G3 Powershot. Due to the multiplier of 1.6 due to the sensor size of the 350D the lens kit will give me the region from 28 to 88mm, 45 to 216mm for the other zoom and 80mm for the prime lens compared to the focal length of 35mm film cameras.

So, what are the reasons, that I finally decided to shell out so much money?

• Speed. There were several situations (Jara and Meret on a turning merry-go-round, Jara a sports event, Jara at her final day at school), where I really had to work hard with the G3 to produce something decent. DSLRs are simply so much faster in focusing and are even capable to lock focus when the object moves.
• Low light capabilities. The 350D can easily operate with the ISO 800 and 1600 settings and will still have less noise than the G3 or any other P&S camera at ISO 200 and 400.
• I prefer the composition through the a view finder. Although I like the Tilt/Swivel LCD of the G3 very much, I find it very distracting to still have the surroundings in my area of view. And considering the fact, that I’m wearing self darkening glasses, this makes seeing something in the LCD display even harder in sun light. Nevertheless the Tilt/Swivel LCD of the G3 is one the reason, I’m going to keep the camera, even if I will have the 350D then.
• And having exchangeable lenses is another advantage.

By choosing another Point & Shot over the 350D I could have improved the situation compared to the G3, however the better focusing speed and low light capabilities of a DSLR turned me to the 350D.

The price, that this deal costs, is still gnawing at my conscience however. On the other hand this year was financially one of the better years for us even though the general economics aren’t so good. And I don’t think, that the camera would be getting so significantly cheaper, that it would make a day/night difference.

Tools like Neatimage and Noise Ninja are well known for what they can do to the noise in pictures from digital cameras. Since the Neatimage website has also examples for improvements to scanned images, I decided to try it myself with one of my scanned images from the Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV. And I must really say, the results are amazing. The left half of the picture to the right is unprocessed. The (vertical) border goes right through the centre of the clock and the right half was processed by Neatimage in automatic mode. The colour noise is nearly completely gone. Really, really great.