This weekend was rather enjoyable. I was invited to The Westin to be the photographer at Alessia's First Communion party, and found myself enjoying the afternoon in the midst of her warm Italian family. And Alessia looked like a beautiful young lady in her First Communion Dress.
Here are few of my favorite images from the party.
I've hit a lens wall. I initially bought the Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8. Foolishly I sent it back and decided to "upgrade" to a professional lens, the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8. It was foolish because the price difference was HUGE, $600 vs $1300, and I'm not seeing a difference in image quality, actually I think the quality isn't there.
The Canon lens arrived the other day, but it didn't work right. This was probably due to the large box it was packed in, and the big bubble to protect it from being jarred in transit was flat. I'm assuming it banged around and shifted more than a lens should, so needless to say, back it went. The replacement lens has arrived. This one works correctly, but I'm not seeing the image quality I expect from a lens more than twice the cost of the Sigma. If this doesn't change over the next few days, the Canon L lens will go back, and I'll happily welcome back the Sigma!
I think this also confirms when it's time to purchase the 70-200mm f/2.8, I'll be purchasing the Sigma lens for $1300 and forego the Canon for $2300. In many of the reviews it is comparable, if not better in regards to image quality. One last note, I didn't see chromatic aberrations in the Sigma lens, sadly, I've seen some in the Canon lens....
I guess I will not be a die hard Canon L lens fan girl. Sorry Canon, but it appears Sigma has some great lenses amongst their lineup!
For the pixel peepers who would like to compare. Here is an image from the Canon and an image from the Sigma.
Canon 70mm, ISO 100, f/2.8, 1/80
Sigma 50mm, ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/40
This St Patty's Day weekend my family and I packed up the car and went down to Ocean City MD for a long weekend, some R&R and a parade. I'm sad to report the weather was gorgeous in NJ while we were away in the endless fog and cold down in OC, MD.
This trip presented a great time to become familiar with the 85mm portrait lens, which had arrived a few days prior to our departure.
I have to say, the hardest part of the trip may have been helping my 3yr old son gather up the candy thrown in the parade before all the kids rushed in to snatch it out from under him. Holding him back when he was constantly trying to get too close to the parade and taking pictures with my 7D in one hand and the other hand on my sons head, to assure I didn't lose him in the crowd as I looked through the viewfinder.
Click on the image to scroll through all the images...
After a prior post mimicking images of the man holding multiple DSLR's with telephoto lenses attached, I'm eating my words. I vowed I was going to keep it simple by upgrading to the X-Pro 1 instead of the usual bulky DSLR. Through trial and error, I've learned a DSLR with decent focus tracking needs to be the next addition.
Last night I hit the purchase buttons and will keep my fingers crossed I made the right decision in choosing the Canon 7D over the 5D Mark ii. My only true concern after viewing TNTC images produced from the above said camera bodies was what I perceived as "soft" images. I've grown accustomed to the tack sharpness of the X-100 when I view the image at 100%.
So after accepting my fate of softer images at the focal point. I then went on to spend obsessive amounts of time trying to decide which lenses to initially purchase with the body. The standard lens lineup for wedding photographers usually consists of a few fast primes, 24-70mm and the 70-200mm. The initial set of lenses I decided on is the 85mm f/1.8 and a Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8. The Sigma lens was a hard one to convince myself to purchase, since it won't fit a FF DSLR, but I think for the APS-C sensor it will be excel in wedding photography.
Next on the itinerary (next year or so) consists of purchasing a few L lenses and a FF DSLR, probably the 5D Mark iii.
In looking around at other wedding photographer's websites, I've noticed one disturbing thing in common... most seem to be using Flash for the entire site.
For those of you that are not well versed in web technologies, Flash is a proprietary framework developed by Adobe that provides some nifty multimedia features for interactive sites. Flash was a necessity for many years because there was no other reasonable way to do animations or play music and videos.
But fortunately, in 2012 this is a different story. With modern browsers we can do cool animations with SVG and canvas, we can play music and video with HTML5 features and we can make sites more interactive with current Javascript frameworks (like jQuery).
Going off on a technical rant like this may be over the heads of regular web surfers, but here's why I think it's important to stay far away from flash:
- It's big, most flash sites have download indicators because you usually need to download tons of content to render a page. You also need to download the entire Flash runtime to get anything to work.
- It's horrible for mobile, Android supports Flash to a limited degree, but it's hardly a good experience. Flash does not support touch gestures so it's mostly useless on these devices. And don't forget, viewing these sites on an iPad or iPhone is impossible.
- Adobe has discontinued Flash for Andriod. Nuff said.
- It's proprietary technology, so the platform is in the interest of Adobe shareholders, not the users of the technology. The vast majority of the web is based on open standards and open source software. Flash bucks this trend big time.
- Running music on your site by default is a terrible idea. This isn't so much a Flash issue, but just horrible web design. How many times have you been in a situation where a website starts playing audio in a completely inappropriate setting? It's just a bad idea. Let the user turn it on themselves if they want audio.
- Flash fragments the web, it really does. We are at the mercy of whether Flash is supported on various operating systems (like Windows, MacOS, Linux). It took years for Linux to get decent Flash support, why put ourselves through that?
I feel like the photography industry is a few years behind in web development. The good news is that we have some incredible resources that can allow us non programers to create amazing sites without knowing how to code. Just learning the basics in setting up a Wordpress site is a great start (and easy to find technical expertise if needed).
I personally setup lisadinicoas.com over a weekend after doing a bit of research. It's not perfect, but it's a start for me. There are lots of things for me to learn, but for now I have a site that gets the job done and it's accessible to people on all types of devices. So my request to other photographers out there, look into what 2012 has for web technology and embrace open standards. The quicker the web rids itself of Flash, the better off we'll all be.
As photographers we should ultimately be looking at what we want to present. Is it with flashy web design with things to distract people from our photography? The point of the web is to present our photos to potential clients. We need to be aware of this when our web design becomes distracting from our photos. I feel our photos should speak for themselves, with our sites as their canvas.
Today we got to see Nonno. Sadly, it wasn't the type of visit you wish for your 3 yr old to have with their grandfather. My son's Nonno was driving up from FL and passing through NJ on his way to CT to attend his brothers funeral. I did capture a few cute pics, no matter how much they resisted from overexhaution!
