Now For Something Completely Different

The Ultimate team here at UTD is hosting the annual Ultimate 101 tournament on October 13th and 14th. I estimate I'll take around 1000 pictures that weekend if not more. This weekend we got in a crunch to design something to put in the discs we will be selling and this is what I came up with and what the team determined will get printed on our discs. To order one contact me, the price is $10.

Yesterdays News

Two Tuesdays ago I turned in some prints for the class' identity themed show.

Love/Hate, but mostly Love

I've now had my camera for about two weeks and it certainly has brought a spark to my lulling relationship with photography. I may not be at the point where I was five years ago when I got my first digital camera, the Panasonic SV-AV10, one of those cool little convergence gadgets, where I am shooting at least 100 pictures daily, but I would say that with how much I have shot when I am shooting, the average per day is not too far off from those figures of yesteryear. Here are some of the things I love the most about my new camera, and a few that I wish would go away.

First, the things I love.

• The camera feels sturdy.
• I've picked up the Digital Rebel, which I ordered and canceled in favor of the Maxxum 7D, and it lacked the substance of the 7D. The 7D has some weight to it, but not enough to be a drag, and it fits my hand very well, whereas the Rebel feels sort of like a toy in comparison, heck, my Toshiba PDR-M700 might be at least as heavy as the Rebel and I certainly prefer the grip and girth.
• The knobs.
• The 7D has enough knobs to overwhelm even some of the most experienced users. All of the main controls have their own dials, knobs and buttons, with dials upon dials that help keep me from having to dig through menus to change my ISO, shooting mode, bracketing mode, even my focal areas and modes.

• Picture quality.
• Sure, I gave up two megapixels for a camera with more girth, options, and a rock bottom price, but I see no reason to double guess myself on this one. All of the prints I have gotten done so far, all 8 x 10, have come out looking great and the only ones that might have visual issues are the ones I have shot at ISO 3200, which is not due to the number of pixels, but to the ISO. The Rebel, I might add, has no means to push the camera to 3200. Count it.

• The price.
  
• Price was the biggest gripe all the reviews I could find online about the 7D had. Price is probably my favorite thing about this camera upon first getting it. I paid almost 1/10 of its initial MSRP of $1,500. The price I paid for the camera/lens kit was almost half of what I had paid for the Rebel body I ordered and canceled. This has allowed me a bit of free spending to invest in my camera and led me to a 75 - 300mm F4.5-5.6 lens which will be a huge plus when shooting all that hot ultimate action, a spare battery, lens filters for all of my lenses(this includes one long overdue filter for my 35mm Rebel), and two CF cards, the primary 4 gig 133x card and a 1 gig for any times I may fill up the 4 gig and want to keep shooting while I'm uploading to the computer. At this point, my spending has probably not reached the point it would have passed long ago had I bought the Rebel XT body, had to buy at least one lens, and still had to find a card and some filters. Oh, I also bought a fancy-schmancy camera bag for the body, lenses, and all the accessories.

That having been said, there are a few things I wish I could change, or I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.

• The exposure correction +/-.
• In full manual mode, I have less control over the amount of exposure compensation, even though there is a knob with fixed numbers on it. The camera just takes over and will only take a suggestion as to where I want to go with the correction and does the best it can with that. That having been said, the best it can involves switching to beyond -2 when I set the knob at +3. This is something I'll have to work on and I am sure will not be such an issue when I shoot action during the daytime, as opposed to all the night practices.

• Autofocus can go crazy sometimes.
• I've tried the manual setting of focus points, automatic, and everything in between, but sometimes the camera may be just slightly out of focus and the 300mm lens decides it wants to span it's entire focal range a couple of times before arriving at a good focal point right next to its starting point.

• Discontinued
• This is something I knew going into 7D ownership, but accessories, mostly the vertical battery grip that will only work with this camera is very hard to find and when found goes for at least $200...that's right, more than I paid for the camera itself!

I refuse to pretend I've got any major beef with this camera. I just love it and see myself using it for years and years and years.

Identity...I don't like this theme

The best thing I can come up with for the Identity theme is "you are what you eat" which involved me taking pictures of my food-less fridge. Hope it works.