Tag Archives: Equipment

Equipment

Backpacking Photography Equipment – My Approach

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Since the summer backpacking season is upon us – though it will be at least a few more weeks before I’m out and about in the back-country – it seems like a good time to post a pointer to a post I wrote earlier (and update every year) about my backpacking photography equipment.

I have backpacked in the Sierra Nevada – and occasionally elsewhere – for more than four decades, believe it or not. My total time on the trail can be measured in years if you add it all up. Over the years I’ve gone through a diverse range of approaches to integrating my photography with my time on the trail: early on I used to carry film SLRs, I gradually moved to smaller and lighter and less capable cameras, for a while I decided to not let photography interfere with the backpacking experience at all, and these days the photography has again become a primary reason for the backpacking.

I’ve evolved an approach to doing serious photography on the trail that works really well for me. It has to do partly with the selection of equipment that I’ve come to use, but it also has to do with my philosophy about what, when, where, and how to shoot. If you are serious about doing photography on the trail, I hope that the article has something to offer to you, whether your approach turns out to be similar to or quite different than mine.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Equipment, Technique

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Live View and Night Photography

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I have shot a few thousand frames with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II now. I’ve photographed a variety of subjects including a few days of rainy professional bicycle stage racing, several landscape subjects, and a productive evening of night photography with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I plan to eventually write up something resembling a comprehensive report on my experience, but so far there hasn’t been time. With that in mind, here is a short piece on one new feature in this camera and my experience with it.

Among the photographic subjects that interest me is night photography, often of urban and industrial subjects, but occasionally of wild landscapes also. There are a number challenges to shooting in very dark conditions, but one of the more interesting is getting good focus in conditions where auto-focus often can’t find a target to work with and where it is too dark to manually focus. (I wrote a bit about this in a recent piece: “Hints for Night Photography.”)

During my last Mare Island shoot I discovered that Live View provides a very useful option for focusing at night. On the 5D II, the Live View mode raises the mirror and lets you look at a “live view” of your scene on the rear LCD. In very dim light the trick is to find something that might provide a manual focus target, center the rectangular LCD indicator over that “something,” zoom in to 10x magnification on this object, and then focus manually on the LCD image. I was amazed at the low light levels at which this works quite well. A vertical line in a wall, the edge of a window, a bit of cyclone fence, or a small light – any of these become decent manual focus targets using Live View.

When I started my Mare Island evening shoot, using this camera for the first time at night, I mostly did things the old fashioned way. By the end of the evening, in any very dim situation I was successfully and much more quickly getting good focus using Live View. I’m confident that night photographers are going to find that this is a very powerful and useful feature.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Shipyard Structure and Star Trails

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Scaffold and Star Trails

Shipyard Structure and Star Trails. Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California. February 7, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Shipyard scaffolding illuminated by artificial light and moonlight with star trails – Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California.

One more night photograph from Mare Island, this one being the last frame I exposed before my shutter went to shutter heaven. (Well, actually it went to the Canon Factory Service Center a day later…) This was shot with the camera pointing almost straight up, with the north star just outside the frame at the lower right, and the star trails rotating around that position. The illumination is from a combination of light from the nearly-full moon and nearby artificial lighting – and a very long exposure. I don’t understand exactly how this massive steel structure was used, but it is part of the shipbuilding facilities at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard. These structures tower over the old shops and other buildings at the facility.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Commentary, Equipment

‘Low End’ Cameras – Interesting Choices

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An interesting juxtaposition caught my attention this morning.

Yesterday Michael Reichmann posted a very interesting article (“You’ve Got to Be Kidding“) in which he compares the image quality from the (arguably high end point and shoot) $500 Canon G10 with that obtained from his high end Hasselblad medium format digital system. While some are misrepresenting the point of his article to be that the G10 is equal to the Hassy MF system (it isn’t, and he didn’t write that), the significant point is that for many uses the G10 can produce good size prints (13″ x 19” in Reichmann’s article) that are largely indistinguishable from those that came from the MF camera.

At about the same time I saw a link to a dealmac.com posting about sub-$600 prices for the Canon XSi 12.2MP APS-C DSLR with the quite decent EFS 18-55mm image stabilized lens. Anyone who looks at the features of this camera objectively and knows about the generally quite good reviews of this lens understands that this is a tremendous value for a camera system that is more than capable enough for the vast majority of DSLR purchasers.

So, on one hand we have a small almost pocketable camera (the G10) that can produce excellent quality prints as large as most people will ever produce (much larger, in fact). If your point of comparison is DSLRs of a year or two ago – $1000+ in many cases – this is a quite amazing thing, and could induce many buyers to think about the G10 or a similar camera, either as the camera or as an adjunct when traveling light is important. But wait, the cost of a quite decent DSLR isn’t $1000+ any more – it now appears to be perhaps only $100 more than that of the G10.