The long and winding road to Shimla

11-ish a.m.: We're on a bus, driving down an amazingly twisty mountain
road. The young man sitting across from us just pointed out his
university out the window - apparently the largest buildings in the
state, perched on a ridge with an commanding view. Folks are amazingly
friendly here, even to strangers. He's already asked our names so he
could friend us on facebook. Kwazy.

Yesterday, while at Humayan's Temple in Shimla (look it up on google;
it's cool), we met two young Indian men, one a soldier and the other a
banker, both on holiday. We'd been hesitating about entering the
temple as non-Hindi, but they said there was no harm in entering, so
we left our shoes on the cold paved walkway and followed them in to
the smoky little building.

OK; had to stop writing for a while as I was getting carsick because
the road was quite possibly the windiest I'd ever been on, and 120km
to boot. We're in our room in Chandigarh now, waiting for the
restaurant to open for dinner at 7 p.m., about 30 minutes from now.

Anyway, getting back to yesterday, those two guys offered to take us
up to Kufri, a little town about a dozen km north of Shimla, a bit
higher in altitude, and home to a wildlife preserve. I was somewhat
reluctant, but Laura accepted and we walked with them down from the
temple and another 1.5 km to the army base, where we got their car and
started driving.

As soon as he started the car, the stereo started blasting a live
version of Bryan Adams' "Cuts Like A Knife," and they didn't turn it
down, although they did shout back to key us know they loved loud
music and hoped we did, too. Turns out the banker dude was a hobbyist
rally driver, so off we went, speeding up the narrow, crowded
Himalayan road to the awful caterwauling of Bryan Adams. It was
appropriately surreal, and I'll post the video once we're home.

Stopping frequently for directions, sometimes in the middle of the
road such that the pedestrian helping had to shout over the din of
honking horns from the drivers stuck behind us, we eventually made it
to the preserve. Much like everything we've seen, it's simultaneously
awesome and decrepit. There were lots of barking deer, but they were
mangy and didn't bark. The bears were stuffed into a little cave-like
pen while two workmen tried to pull down a tree in the enclosure using
a rope tied to the top such that the tree just swayed around a lot; a
saw would have been more efficient, and it was apparent there were
saws available.

The wolves looked tired and sad. The bright spot was the snow leopard
- it looked healthy and active and was quite lovely to watch. There
were also several pens of local pheasants and other gamebirds, all
quite spectacularly plumed.

The drive down was done to the strains of an Enigma's Greatest Hits
CD, which seemed far better suited to the circumstances.

So, on to today, from where I left off on the bus, feeling a little
queasy. We got into the station at Chandigarh just fine, and my wife and
I had a brief grumpy exchange that apparently left us both with
expressions such that the touts left us mostly alone; I'm thinking of
picking a fight with her in the airport tomorrow to see if it's a
workable tout-avoidance option. It did take four auto-rickshaw drivers
to figure out where the hotel was, though - the facade is hidden
behind an enormously bushy palm tree.

Tonight's hotel is The Kaptain's Retreat, smack in the middle of a
strip mall. The hotel is owned by cricket star Kapil Dev, who has
surprisingly good taste in furnishings, as well as food - the hotel
restaurant dinner was dee-licious.

Before dinner, though, we took a cab to Chandigarh's Rock Garden,
built over time by a nutty artistic guy on what had been vacant land.
It's a cross between Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona and South of The
Border on Route 95 in South Carolina. It's a maze, decorated with
stones, sculptures, and walls made of recycled porcelain, pottery,
crockery, and the like. There are small armies of figures made of
pottery shards, clay, and zillions of old bangle bracelets. We only
had an hour there as we arrived close to the dusk closing time, but it
was a very cool experience.

On the way back to the hotel, our driver got lost and we asked someone
in an adjacent auto-rickshaw for directions at a stoplight. They
thought about it for a bit, then the light changed and our driver
zoomed off. The guy behind us had his driver flag ours down, ran up,
asked if they could join us, then directed our driver to our hotel.
The guy was on his way to work, but still took the time to help.

Anyway, Le Corbusier is responsible for much of Chandigarh's city plan
and quite a few of it's buildings. Too bad we don't have time to check
them out, as we fly out to Udaipur first thing tomorrow, where we'll
settle for the next six days.

Time for lights out. There's a construction project along with what
sounds like a factory right outside our window, complete with loud
music and barking dogs. My wife is already sound asleep.

Day 14, India

Today's coordinates: the Lemon Tree Hotel, Muhamma, Alleppey, Kerala,
India

Time: 2009-12-23 18:29:38 +0530
ISO6709: +24.611789+73.661613+0/
Google: http://maps.google.com/?q=24.611790,73.661613

This morning we left Udaipur at 6:30, our ancient cab winding though
the dark, narrow streets, which were surprisingly empty at that hour,
save for all the dogs, cows, and motorcycle milkmen.

Airport security seemed a bit tighter than on our last internal
flight, no doubt due to the approach of Christmas. The flight was
smooth, although the pilot set us down in the middle of the runway in
Mumbai, necessitating an overly exciting stop at the very, very, very
end of the runway. You'll learn more soon about Indian driving habits.
At least they're all consistent.

The connecting flight left 90 minutes late, all of which was spent
sitting in the plane at the gate, as the airport was temporarily
closed for an unnamed VIP's arrival. At least our seatmate was
pleasant, so the conversation helped pass the time.

Once airborne, it was somewhat surreal to find myself aboard an Indian
aircraft, flying low over the jungle, listening to Muzak Christmas
carols playing over the plane's PA system. Feliz Navidad, ... Feliz
Navi-dad, ... Namaste. This is your captain speaking (in Hindi).

Once in Cochin, we hired a taxi for the 90km drive to the resort.
Sweet Jeebus. The drivers in southern India make the rolling circus in
Delhi seem comparitively civilized. No one really seems to like their
side of the road, instead crossing into opposing traffic at 90+ km/h
for no apparent reason, blowing their horn, perhaps flashing their
lights, perhaps not. Our driver managed it all in tit-for-tat fashion,
swerving out of the way at the latest possible second, never using
more than a couple of fingers to manage the wheel, and refusing to
shift any lower than third gear, which made for painfully labored
starts in the tiny, underpowered Tata hatchback he piloted.

Even better, it is 90F and humid here, and the little extortionist
wanted an extra 500 rupees to turn on the car's air conditioning. You
all must understand that my level of self-restraint is worthy of a
statue somewhere, as I managed to say "no, thank you," instead of
exposing him to the volumes of unsavory language I've acquired over
the years. The little opportunist even tried to wrangle more money out of
us because he failed to get proper directions before we left, and thus
overshot the turn to the resort by 6km or so. Watching him stop every
few hundred meters to grudgingly ask pedestrians for directions was
somehow enjoyable, although we seemed to understand the Hindi
directions better than he did.

He was the first taxi driver we've encountered who wore his seatbelt.
Encouraged, we looked for ours, only to find that the buckles had been
cut out. I asked the whereabouts of the rear seatbelts, and the driver
shook his head, smiled, and said, "not required." I then asked why he
wore one, and, in true Hindi fashion, he smiled and said nothing more.
Life is apparently cheap here, and ours must ring up at even less than
his.

We eventually found our way to the resort, which is a couple
kilometers down an unmarked road (no big deal there, though; *all* the
roads here are unmarked; if there ever were road signs, they've long
since been stolen and used as building materials), we again had to
surrender our passports for a couple hours to the innkeepers so they
could photocopy them and register us with the local police station.
It's been the same drill in every town.

All foreign tourists are under very close scrutiny these days because
of it coming out that the mastermind of last year's attacks in Mumbai
was an American citizen, albeit of Pakistani origin. Another classic
case of closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. They're at
least polite about it all, though, and are treating all foreigners the
same regardless of nationality so as to properly inconvenience
everyone equally.

And the room is nice, with the resort being on a lovely lake of
dubious quality. However, if the hotel's pretty little swimming pool
is half as chlorinated as the water that comes out of the shower tap,
it's going to be as sanitary as hell.

We'll explore more tomorrow.

My Review of Gramicci Musoga Sport Pants - Nylon (For Men)

The epic travel tripod search begins

OK, so I need a new compact travel tripod, and I mean compact, and it's gotta be able to hold at least a Canon 5D Mark II and a 24-70 f/2.8 lens, and ideally my 1Ds Mark II and the same lens. Did I mention that I want the whole thing to fold down to 16 inches or so?

I've found several from Gitzo that meet the weight criteria, but they're all 20+ inches long when folded, so they're out of the running. The Gitzo 1541T carbon model definitely fits the bill, but it's price is a usurious $600, *without* a head. I'm sure it's a swell tripod, but I'd rather put that money toward another lens or some lighting gear.

So the search continued. In 2007 I bought a small carbon Induro for a trip to Europe, but it was kinda flimsy and still fairly long when stowed (about 20 inches), and the spelling of the name drove me nuts, so it was sold off via eBay.

Things then swung the other way - if I couldn't find the compact tripod of my dreams for less than the price of a cheap used car, I'd get something really sturdy and compactness be damned. The Gitzo GT2942 seemed nice, so I got one, along with a second-hand aluminum Gitzo G1415. Oddly enough, they're the same length folded (19 inches), but the 1415 weighs as much as a school bus. Once it's set up, though, it doesn't move. They've both been serving me well for the past year or so.

But now there's a three-week trip to India on the horizon and being able to travel very light is again something important. The spendy Gitzo is still not an option, even if only on principle.

An evening's worth of Web searching turned up the relatively new Chinese brand Benro. Calumet and Adorama stock most of their stuff, and of special interest is a line called "travel angel," which looked like a reverse-engineered version of the svelte Gitzo, but at nearly half the price. Reviews were difficult to come by, and, as the ones I found were written by photographers, the grammar was so lousy that I again got disgusted and moved on. Having been an editor in my past life, the running joke in the newsroom was that most photographers couldn't spell their own names save for the fact that they'd had their whole lives to practice it.

In any event, I thought that the largest model would work, and the aluminum version (TRA269) seemed priced quite nicely at $190 from Adorama.

Then we enter the world of "this is why buying locally is better than mail order." No one in Seattle stocks the Benro tripods, though, so I'm buying without the ability to actually handle the tripod first. The tripod arrived late last week - build, fit and finish, and functions were all great, especially for the price. I didn't at all like the head's quick-release platform, but I was planning to swap it out anyway with a Really Right Stuff B2 Pro platform I had kicking around, so no big deal there. The problem, and eventual deal-breaker, was the diameter of the thing when folded up. The folded length was perfect at about 16", but it was nearly 5" in diameter, which would be like sticking a stack of one-quart paint cans in your camera bag; too bulky!

There are two smaller models available, the TRA169 and TRA069, but nowhere can I find listed the closed diameter of any tripod. The smaller aluminum versions only holds five pounds, so it's out, but the carbon TRCB069 holds 12 pounds and should do the trick. Adorama wants $400, but I can get it on eBay for $300 straight from China, so that's where the process stands for now while I decide whether to buy the thing from China and risk not liking it.

So, it's back to Adorama with the aluminum Benro TRA269 tripod for now. If anyone actually reads this post and has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Please stop undervaluing your work, at least for my sake, OK?

Pricing is a thorny issue at best, and we’re all aware that these are not the best of times. Frequently, business owners in service industries will discount their rates in tough times in an attempt to garner more business. This is both dangerous and foolhardy.

I recently had a conversation with an architect about pricing, so I’ll use his industry as an example to illustrate this point.

Consumers of architectural services have come to expect that if they shop around, they’ll find an architect who’s willing to do a particular project for what amounts to a loss for that architect, because the architect has an attitude that work is scarce and they need to chase it. For example, if they tell the potential client that it will cost $10,000 to design a building, the architect knows that chances are good that the client will also solicit bids from other architects until they find one who will do the work for less. When a client shops on price, we all know quality is the first thing to suffer, but that’s either not apparent or not an issue to our fictitious client, as he knows that architectural fees are all over the map and they’ll eventually find someone to take their sucker’s bid.

If, on the other hand, someone steps into a law office and asks the attorney to take their case at a discounted rate, they’ll be shown the door, albeit very politely. Attorneys present a united front when it comes to valuing their services. It’s not collusion or price fixing; they all know what it costs to run their businesses and they know the market value of their services.

Why, then, for the love of Ansel Adams, are photographers so willing to do a shoot for less than the cost of producing one? Do they actually think it’ll help them to get more business in the future? Do they think that working for a loss will keep food on the table?

Not only will that practice quickly drive them out of business, it also serves to devalue the entire industry and our entire craft, not to mention driving down the quality of output and, by extension, the clients’ expectation of quality, which further devalues the industry. You can’t tell me that folks will go the extra mile for a client who’s underpaying them, even if that underpayment was the photographer’s idea in the first place.

If you go into a bank and ask for a loan, they’ll tell you that it costs what it costs; there’s no dickering on the fees or rates, even in tough times. You want to have cable television? It costs what it costs, good times or bad. How about a cup of coffee? Or a manicure? A chiropractic adjustment? Have a new set of new tires installed on your car? Those services always cost the same, and only go up over time. Sure, there are discounts and coupons available, but the core price never changes.

There’s a reason for that - the companies providing those services know how much it costs to deliver them, what the profit margins need to be in order to both maintain and grow their businesses. An occasional discount serves to build customer loyalty. A fire sale is a whole different matter.

Do you for one second think that, once the economy turns around, our clients will suddenly think it’s OK to go back to paying $5,000 for something they they’ve been getting for $2,000 or less, even though it really cost $5,000 to produce all along? Of course not. How does one buy and maintain expensive equipment, studio overhead, etc., etc., on hobbyist rates? The short answer is that they don’t.

If you’re looking to curry favor with a client who’s also on hard times, by all means offer them a discount, but for heaven’s sake don’t cut your rates; by doing so you immediately devalue yourself, both in a professional and personal capacity.

By arbitrarily lowering your rates, you are telling people that you were either overcharging them to begin with, which is not good, or that you have no confidence or self-respect, which is almost worse. You’ve immediately declared yourself an underling instead of a peer. Have you ever noticed that the clients who pay your full rate will usually treat you better than the folks to whom you’ve granted a deep discount? That’s because you’ve earned their respect and they see you as a partner in something. The converse is they the client treats you like the garbage collector; someone who is performing a necessary task that doesn’t require much skill and therefore isn’t all that worthy of much attention or respect. It’s not all about money; it’s about knowing how to be a businessperson. Like it or not, if you’re self-employed you need to be a businessperson. If you are not, you’re causing harm to more folks than just yourself.

This could be the beginning of a rapid industry-wide downward spiral unless we create a unified front; otherwise we’re all working for peanuts and photography is going to be looked upon as a cute little hobby that people make a cute little amount of money from. “Oh, you take pictures. How nice. My nephew got a camera for his 15th birthday, … what was it, … a 5D something or other -- I think it’s a lot like that one you’re holding.”

Do you really know how much it costs to produce a photo shoot? Honestly? If not, that’s a large part of the problem. That’s symptomatic of not being a good businessperson. Attorneys are all service providers; they produce nothing tangible, there are no cost-of-goods-sold computations, etc., for them to make, yet they know exactly how much an hour of their services costs, and don’t waver on that, as they’ve got to cover those costs if they’re to make money.

Your profit margin is a cost of doing business; that’s your salary, your future operating capital, and your business savings for the inevitable equipment upgrades. You may have noticed that your local photo equipment shop isn’t cutting its prices; neither is the electric company, your ISP, your cell-phone provider, your automobile mechanic, your bank or your landlord, you still need to pay their regular rates or fees, even though the economic times are tough.

Why, then, have many photographers decided that their services worth less, even though their cost of doing business has not gone down? Photographer services should actually be worth more in tough times, especially in the commercial world; providing valuable images to help companies market their wares in tough times helps companies to maintain sales levels. Produce good results and the client makes more money. That’s valuable. Why do photographers seem to feel that the opposite is somehow true?
Why on earth have photographers decided that the first serious communication with a client includes dickering over the value of their services? This hasn’t “happened” to us, or to architects, or to graphic designers or any other creative types; we have allowed this to happen to us.

There are a million ways to justify cutting rates, but most all of them come down to a lack of business acumen, a lack of confidence, or some combination of both.

Then why have we begun this seemingly desperate race to the bottom? Panic? Fear? I have no idea, but if people don’t pull together we’re all gonna be looking for a different line of work.

There will no doubt be squeals of protest about this article from folks justifying their cuts -- I have kids! I need to make a living! Well, by providing $1,000 worth of work for $500, I’m here to tell you that you’re not making a living. You’re losing money and doing nothing more than burning the furniture to keep warm. When the furniture is gone, you’ll be cold again but will have nowhere to sit while you shiver. To continue with the allegory, if, instead, you were to instead sell some unused furniture to make ends meet while still charging properly for your work, you’ll still be able to afford to heat the place, albeit modestly, but when things turn around you’ll be able to replace that furniture with perhaps something even nicer than what you started with.

Short-term desperation is causing serious damage to this industry; we’re already dealing with a complete removal of the financial barriers to entry. If we add to that the perception that we ourselves don’t value or respect our own hard-earned skills, talents and wisdom, then there’s nothing left.

Real enough for you? I’m not trying to tell you that I think this is the end; I’m telling you that I can see the writing on the wall and it ain’t a pretty read. If anyone out there has an intelligent counter-argument, one that explains how a full-day photo shoot that requires a top-end camera and lighting, takes two full days to plan, a full day to execute with the help of at least one assistant, and another two days to edit and deliver, can be effectively produced for $1,500, I’m all ears. And, yes, people have been bidding $1,500 for jobs like that; I know, as I’ve been underbid three times this summer alone for jobs just like that and the “winning” photographer charged exactly that.

Please explain to me exactly how $1,500 is going to cover a full week’s worth of your work, pay for an assistant, cover gasoline / mileage, equipment, meals, etc., let alone a creative fee.

I’m listening, ...

Backups, Part III and a link to my presentation movie

OK; so instead of retyping what I've already created, here's a link to a presentation I made for the American Institute of Architects about this very subject.

Questions, anyone? Buhler? Buhler?

We interrupt this blog for a two-day road trip

Went on a great road trip to south-central Washington to photograph the landscape and a wind-generation facility. There are plenty of new photos from the trip on my site in the commercial architecture and panorama galleries. Please check them out -- feedback is welcome.

Backups - we all know why they're needed but why don't we do it?

Backups are daunting if you're just starting out -- how much do I back up? Where do I back it up? What about all those unorganized photos, movies, songs, etc.? Sometimes it's just easier to ignore the whole thing rather than tackling the whole problem of organizing just to to *get ready* to do those daunting backups. Right?

Well, sure, until that inevitable system crash and resulting data loss sends you out onto that ledge.

Here's the straightforward, easy way to get organized: start now with new data and don't worry about the old stuff for right now. Create an organization system for your photos, music, whatever, and start putting the new stuff into it. Then, after a fashion, you'll get so sick of looking through all the mess of the old data that you'll slowly start bringing it into the organized system and, before you know it, you can find things. Every time. Quickly and easily.

But what about the backups in the interim? Easy. Get an external drive the same size as your current computer's drive and just duplicate the whole thing for now, and do it on some sort of regular basis. Many drives come with software that lets you schedule your backups; Apple's Time Machine is a good example, but there are plenty of others.

Back to the organization thing: there are several schools of thought: one is the giant bucket school, and then there's the "lots of smaller buckets" school, and degrees of bucket size in between.

What that means is this: put all your images on a disk into one folder, but keyword them using an application like Adobe Lightroom, Apple's iPhoto, etc. You can then search for the photos with the application by whichever parameters you've used for the metadata. The date and camera info should be there by default, created by the camera when the photos were taken, so there's two search terms already. Some cameras have internal GPS recording, and then you'll enter things like info about the subject of the photos, the client you've taken them for, or any other pertinent data. Metadata is great, so long as your editing application doesn't strip it out, which some Windows photo editors do for some reason.

With that in mind, here's what I do. On my server (or your computer's hard drive) create a folder called photos or some such thing, then fill that with folders named for clients (or subjects like mom, dad, cats, ponies, carnival rides, vacations, etc.) Within each of those folders are folders named for the dates of the photos:

photos>client1>2009-04-03

2009-08-11

photos>client4>2007-02-15

And so on. Yours could look like this:

photos>kids>2006-04-09

2008-09-26

photos>vacations>cabin>2009-06

And so on. Just give it a little thought before you start and then be consistent and you'll be OK.

Everybody still with me? Good. Next time I'll expand on some of the details above before moving on to the next step.

Data storage and backups - part 1 of a series

So I’ve been busy doing post-production for several shoots from the past couple of weeks, which got me thinking about data storage and backups for all that hard work. Keeping data safe also helps my clients; if someone loses a disk, I like to be able to replace it for them quickly and easily, and the only way to be able to do that is to have reliable backups that are readily accessible.

When I was just starting out, a couple of external 250G drives were plenty, and it was really easy to do periodic DVD backups as the amount of data was relatively small.

After 10 years in business, though, my image library is pretty beefy; nearly 3TB on the studio’s server and a cabinet filled with DVDs.

How to keep track of it all? How to do backups now that putting all that stuff on DVDs would be a horribly time-consuming and environmentally unsound process? Well, friends, sit right down and listen well; the next several blog posts will be about this very subject, so stay tuned.

Canon 17mm TS-E review update

It's starting to get tiresome posting twice, so until my new site is ready (it'll pull content from here), I'll just redirect you to my blog via this link, as well as by clicking on the article title above.

Rest assured that the information there should reward your clicking efforts, and I promise never to Rick-roll anyone.

Time to start wondering about Photoshop CS5 as Snow Leopard's 64-bit support nears

So, now that Apple is promoting a September 2009 release date for Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS 10.6, 64-bit support will soon be ours, ... I don’t think I’m alone in feeling slighted in that Windows users have been using 64-bit processing for some time now and Apple is quite late to the party, although at least our OS of choice is attractive and mostly quite functional.

In any case, this recent article (translated from the original German) is an interview with Photoshop Chief Architect Russell Williams and Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes, talking (vaguely, of course, and badly translated to boot) about what users might expect in CS5.

Here’s another aggregation of CS5 news, ... again, all this is speculation, but it’s interesting to watch.

Lastly, here’s a real Adobe voice: the venerable John Nack blog.

iPhone panos

So I've been messing around with a few pano apps for the iPhone for some time now; the best so far is simply called Pano; it's been around for seven months or so and allows you to make a single-row pano up to a full 360 degrees. The best part about this app is that it preserves the edge of the previous photo in sequence as a transuscent strip down the left edge of the phone's screen so it's easy to get the proper overlap and alignment.

A newer app is called Auto Stitch; you take the photos in sequence, even in multiple rows, then load them into the app from the camera roll. Despite the claims on the app's page, I've only been able to get it to stitch four or five frames at a given time, as the app otherwise crashes, no doubt due to memory constraints. Perhaps it works better on the 3Gs than on my 3G, but it's a dissapointing implementation of an otherwise great idea.

I've attached a couple iPhone panos made with Pano, one from Fiji and the other here in Seattle.

Weekend Update

Here’s a compilation of some random and interesting bits of news gleaned from the Web this morning:

• So it seems that Apple’s Steve Jobs has resurfaced following a liver transplant in a Tennessee hospital: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=20041

• NEC has rolled out a 43” LCD monitor that’s awesome to behold and equally awesome in it’s wallet-smashing abilities: http://www.slashgear.com/nec-crv43-43-inch-curved-lcd-arrives-july-for-8k-0445950/

• Sharp has come up with a method to make each pixel on an LCD monitor consist of five colors for improved accuracy. Not as glamorous as the NEC monster above, but far more realistically useful: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/05/29/sharp_five_colour_lcd_panel/

• AT&T responds to iPhone customer bitching about it’s usury-level rate plans and upcoming tethering option here: http://www.facebook.com/ATT?v=app_7146470109 I’m all for a company being profitable, but gouging customers is another matter. I can’t believe that, on top of the onerous data plan and charging absurd rates for text messages that don’t cost the phone companies anything to transmit, they’re going to charge for tethered use as well when everyone else gets it for free.
AT&T is also “generously” allowing people to upgrade early and sign a fresh two-year contract when all their other phone contracts are for one year. AT&T apparently still has some folks on staff who are trying to resurrect the good old days of the Ma Bell monopoly, when they rented you a land line phone as no one was allowed to own their own home phone, and when phoning someone in the next town was a long-distance call.

Check out Scott Hove's work in the July issue of Hi-Fructose magazine

San Francisco artist (and friend) Scott Hove has been working on some very cool sculpture - cakes! But these cakes have fangs, and one is large enough to walk in to. Hi Fructose is an amazingly cool art magazine - you should definitely check it out!

And, yes, I did some of those photos for Scott when I was in San Francisco for the American Institute of Architects national convention a couple of months ago.

Hands-on with the new Canon 17mm and 24 mm tilt-shift lenses

Thanks to our local Canon rep, I got a chance today to shoot with both of Canon’s newest lenses: the TS-E 17mm f/4L and the TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II. In a nutshell, they both rock. Completely. It’s good enough that, if I couldn’t afford one, I’d sell other lenses to get a copy. Really.

We met at the Seattle Central Library; it seemed a good place to demo the lenses as there’s lots of room and lots of vertical lines to look at. I got busted for using a tripod, though (apparently it’s against the rules), but was encouraged to continue shooting, so it was freehand for most of the two hours we were there.

I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by the 17 and to leave the demo wanting to upgrade my 24 to the newer version, as I’ve been disappointed with Canon’s aspherical 14mm lens - the distortion makes it an unpleasant choice for shooting architecture. I figured the 17 would be an improvement, but wasn’t expecting much.

I started out with the 17 on my 1Ds Mark II, then used both it and the 24 on a 5D Mark II. First off, let’s compare the build of the lenses to the current TS-E offerings.

If you’re familiar with Canon’s tilt-shift lenses, you’ll know that their tilt mechanism is in one plane and the shift in another. The 17’s movements are in the same plane, allowing for compound movements in the same plane, a great asset and something not formerly available unless you were brave enough to have at your expensive lens with a screwdriver and a steady hand. The 24 II’s movements remain as they are in the original.

The construction, fit, finish and mechanical operation are smooth, tight, and attractive. The lenses look a lot less like something that came out of a Soviet surplus depot and more like a well-thought design. The knobs are larger and easier to turn, although the lens’ habit of tilting or shifting when you’re walking around is still present, even with the locking screws tightened.

The 17 doesn’t have a hood -- it’s too wide. The lens cap is of a new design, requiring a slide-clip be held while the cap is twisted on like a lens hood. The glass is beautiful, and protrudes quite far from the end of the lens in a fisheye-esque curve. Because of this, a bit of extra care needs to be taken with this lens to avoid physical damage to the glass.

I do regret not taking any photos of the lenses mounted on the camera, but I’m a photographer and was excited about spending time using the lenses, and pretty much forgot to take photos of them. Here’s some basic info: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0902/09021806canon17mm24mmtselenses.asp

The above photo was shot with my 1Ds Mk. II on a tripod before I got busted and had to stow away the tripod. The lens is wide - the advertised field of view is 104˚ diagonally - it’s w-i-d-e. The photo is uncorrected - the camera was perfectly level, which definitely helps, but there’s not really any distortion and the chromatic aberration that plagued many copies of the original 24mm TS-E seems to have been much reduced, at least from what I was able to see in the images from today’s two-hour session.

With the protruding front element, flare is definitely an issue - you really need to pay attention to all light sources when shooting with the 17.

I was quite impressed with the wide field of view and relative lack of barrel distortion, even when hand-holding shots purposely far off level.

Candidly, I spent most of my time with the 17, mostly because I already own a copy of the 24 and would rather acquire the wider lens first, then upgrade a lens I’m mostly happy with anyway.

I’ll write more once I get a chance to spend more time with the resulting images. My overall impression? If you shoot interiors, you’ll want one of these.