Don't Panik – Eugene's little blog
Food, travel and Photography
Canon has released a firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II that enables manual control of ISO, aperture and shutter speed while the camera is set to capture video. Firmware v1.1.0 also disables the depth of field preview button when playing back photos or accessing the on-screen menus and corrects various bugs.
More information on firmware v1.10, as well as links to download it, are here. Two PDFs describe how to use the new features: English/French/Spanish or Japanese/English/Chinese.
Wanted to post this earlier but time did not permit. Anyways, when we went on a Saturday, traffic to mid-valley mall was clear despite the heavy rain and there was ample parking. Touted as the Malaysia equivalent of Photokina or Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show, DCIM or Digital Camera, Imaging and Media show was a let-down. Some people wondered why Sony was absent. I don’t consider Sony a digital camera player still (sorry, my bias!) despite them buying Konica-Minolta. Most of the display consisted of everyday products like memory cards, light boxes, printers and all that. One part of the area just had prints from magazine contests and a few other local photographers. They didn’t even have prints from Malaysia’s most awarded photographer! Anyways, even the Canon or Nikon booth was just a glorified display area with cameras for everyone to play with. No 500D or 270EX flash, nothing new like radio poppers or the new pocket wizard. The only thing there was a lot of were underweight, leggy women. Yup, the whole show seemed to revolve around the models. There was a model search and every day, a model parade will be held and more. People seemed to be coming for that, all equipped with ladders and all. All very ho-hum for me. I think they should have called in the Digital Camera and Model show.
Oh, well, just have three photos to share. So disappointing generally that my Mark II stayed in my Think Tank most of the time.
The truth is that I’m more excited about the 270EX flash than the 500D. There are nice features on the 500D though but the only big drawback I see is the lack of an external microphone input. 720P or 1080P is no different to the users of this class of camera but without the external mic, everything, including the image stabilizer gyro is going to be picked up by the mic. For a lot of other people however, if the price comes in at or below RM2999, it will sell like hot cakes.
Rob Galbraith has more details here.
With the explosion of Digital cameras, digital video recorders, iTunes, MP3 players, Youtube and more, storage of digital media is going to be very important, if not downright critical. How many people do you know who really backup what digital media files they have? It doesn’t need to be photos or videos. I know this entry is filed under Photography but digital media can mean documents and spreadsheets as much as photos and video. It can also be your digital audio collection.
Primarily, the backup we’re talking about is just a second copy of your information somewhere else. Where? Well, anywhere other than your PC is good. I don’t agree much with same PC backup (and generally, many users can’t tell the difference between physical drives and partitions, etc). So the question is where and how to store the backup.
WHERE?
The most simple location is probably very ubiquitous, the USB drive (aka thumb drive, usb stick, etc, etc). With drive capacities at 32Gb and beyond, and at affordable prices, it makes is ideal for users with limited amount of information. My parents for one can do with a 4gb USB drive. If you have more stuff to backup, get a portable or external hard drive. Here are some that I know of that users have had good experiences with: Western Digital MyBook Essentials or Seagate FreeAgent Go if you want something portable. For larger disk capacity, Western Digital Essential, Home or Studio or Seagate’s FreeAgent Xtreme make good buys. For heavier disk storage and on a networked environment (like me), you can go with a Network Storage Appliance (NAS). I recommend QNAP’s TS-209 or Synology’s DS-207. Those on a tighter budget can opt for DLink’s DS-323 or single drive versions of the QNAP and Synology models I mention previously. However, those require a bit more know-how to setup and manage. Me, I run a custom built NAS which is actually a dual-core box (speed doesn’t matter) with 8-SATA disk ports (these matter, RAID is not required) and 4GB RAM (this also matters). Read the full entry to see how it is setup.
HOW
This is as important as where because if you don’t store your backup properly, you’d find yourself in trouble when you need the backup. Generally, most people can get by with weekly or even monthly backups. We aren’t large corporations needing daily or hourly backups so a week or so is good for 99% of home users. Some probably can get by with once a month. If using a portable hard drive, make sure you keep that in a safe place. I’m not going into backup software but because I don’t use them myself — primarily, my goal is to mirror (copy all) the data across to another disk. I use Acronis TruImage to backup the system drive but applications can be re-installed, data can’t so my focus here is on data. Firstly, ensure your data is stored logically and in an organized drive. This makes backing up easy. My favorite tool is robocopy. It works very reliably, and the ability to monitor folders for changes is invaluable. I use robocopy to copy from my network PCs directly to the backup server regularly. If you want a prettier utility, there’s Allways Sync.
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Here are my select images from the morning shoot…
All photos – manual exposure, manual white balance (daylight, shade or cloudy white balance). Zoom-exposure for effect (one photo). Photoshop CS4 for RAW conversion.
More to come. Meanwhile, had a packed day from 7:30am onwards till late playing fireworks with my nephew. Time to crash into bed so this will suffice for now.
