Tomorrow starts a week of shoots at Tumbledown Gymnastics Studio, and in preparation for shooting in pretty dodgy light, I ordered a little something from nice folks at borrowlenses.com – the Canon 135mm f/2 L lens.

To check it out, I accompanied my long-suffering daughter on her exploration of the arroyo beside our house, and grabbed some images.

This is far from a full review, but I really like it. It’s pretty small (at least on a 5D) and unintimidating (although the hood is a chunky addition), which helps in certain situations.

It seems to focus quickly (even on the slightly sluggish 5D), it’s very sharp (as you’d expect from an L prime), and it delivers some nice creamy bokeh. Both these test images were shot at f/2.5, and I love the way the backgrounds disappear as the long focal length, 8-blade construction and nearly wide-open aperture all combine.

So it’s off to the gym tomorrow with it (together with my 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.8). I’ll post some shots from the gymnastics shoots during the week.

Like many an impatient Aperture user, I recently took the Lightroom 3 Beta for a spin. What follows is an informal review of my experience of Lightroom 3 Beta as a long-time Aperture user, and Apple Certified Pro in Aperture.

I mainly looked at the adjustment settings rather than the organizing or exporting options.

I hadn’t looked closely at Lightroom 2, so many of the things I liked about Adobe’s product were probably there in the earlier version too.

My overall view is that Lightroom includes some very valuable adjustment features that Aperture 2 gets nowhere near. The rumoured arrival of Aperture X (the rebranded Aperture 3) means I’m not making any snap decisions, but the revised Aperture needs at least to match Lightroom’s strengths to stay competitive.

Baked-in local adjustments

Aperture 2 has a plug-in architecture that saves out a tiff of the image you’re working on, and then lets you make adjustments to that. This is the only way to make adjustments to certain areas of an image (aside from the patching tools).

But these are pretty blunt tools for local adjustments, and they also depend on destructive editing – you have to create a new version of the file to use them. Since one of the main benefits of Aperture (and Lightroom) is that your adjustments (and multiple versions of different files) don’t create a bunch of new files, this is a big drawback.

Lightroom’s local adjustments are more subtle (the iris enhance feature is simple and effective, the spot patching more intuitive), and crucially, they’re non-destructive. You’re working in the regular file, and can go back and forth with edits, and go in whatever order you like. In Aperture, you have to dodge and burn last, or you’ll be adjusting on the tiffs, rather than the (preferable) RAW version.

Lightroom’s gradient adjust feature is also a powerful feature that Aperture can’t match. The default use would be to darken the sky while leaving the foreground untouched, but it needn’t be set vertically, so you could it use for some funky sideways effects to lead the eye to one side of the frame or the other.

Preset joy

In Aperture you can only save and apply presets in particular bricks – so you can apply preset Exposure settings using the Exposure brick, or preset Enhance settings from the Exposure brick. But there’s no simple way to apply a whole range of preset settings in one click (you could Lift and Stamp from an existing photo, but that’s a bit of a kludge).

Lightroom includes default presets that work across its range of adjustments with one click – very handy for getting close to what you’re after quickly, before fine-tuning images individually.

You can also save your own presets (or download others). Aperture also supports these type of options, but again only brick-by-brick.

Distracting interface

It’s not all fun and games though. Compared to Aperture, Lightoom’s UI seems a little cluttered and distracting. The white balance picker is big and clunky, the gruesome red eye reduction rollover effect is unnecessary, and the crop icons again too big and graphically prominent.

Do you really need a large-ish picture of a spirit level to accompany the angle adjust control, especially when there’s a big ‘Angle’ label right beside it?

While I’m sure with time I’d start to see past these, but it definitely feels like Aperture is more understated and controlled in its UI – which is exactly what you want when you should be concentrating on your images.

Conclusion

When it comes to adjustment controls, Lightroom Beta 3 clearly has the edge over Aperture 2. That said, if Aperture X includes image-wide presets, local adjustments and gradient filters, I’d stay with it in a heartbeat.

Fingers crossed, then, for Aperture X.

I’m a photographer and web designer and I work partly from home, and partly from my office. At least once a week I ride my bike to work. I need a bag that’ll help me do all this stuff, while not making me look like a dork who’s carrying a bunch of expensive gear.

And after a long search, I’ve found it: a Timbuk2 Medium Messenger, with a Waterfield Designs sleeve for my MacBook Pro, and a Tenba camera insert for the DSLR and stuff.

I have a LowePro Slingshot for when I’m only carrying camera gear, but I was looking for something that would work for day to day commuting – I almost always carry the laptop, and often a camera and a couple of lenses.

Crumpler – nice guys, no joy

I like Crumpler as a company, and a lot of folks I know really like their bags. But nothing they make in a messenger shape (as opposed to a backpack) would really work for me.

I could have gone for a Complete Seed with a Bucket insert, but that looks huge.

And the Barney Rustle Blanket I (temporarily) bought turned out to be too small – it just about fits a 15″ Macbook Pro in a sleeve, but there’s definitely no room for a DSLR (even without an insert).

The guys at Crumpler were sympathetic when I told them my requirements, and didn’t try to sell me on something that wouldn’t work, but there’s definitely seems to be a gap there.

Tenba insert for the win

I already have a large Timbuk2 messenger, and while it can carry a massive amount of stuff (good for travelling when you need to bring everything), there’s a real danger that stuff just bangs around in the large main bag.

The Timbuk2 Medium Classic Messenger is obviously smaller, but I still wanted a way to organise things. Enter the bargain Tenba Photo Insert. It’s meant as a replacement for a specific Tenba bag, but as the review on B&H (where I bought mine) show, it’s a favourite for photographers looking to convert all kinds of bags.

It comes with a number of foam and velcro dividers, so you can set up the insert how you like it. I’ve got three compartments, with the camera face-down in the middle one. With lots of padding all around, it offers the protection and organisation I was looking for. Now all I needed was the bag to put it in.

Back to the old faithful

I got my first Timbuk2 bag in 1994 or so, when I coveted one my sister brought back from a trip to the US. But would they have a bag now that matched my specific requirements?

I liked the Commute (recently updated to be TSA approved). The rubberised bottom was nice, and the separate laptop sleeve cozy. But it doesn’t have a cross-strap which makes it useless if you ever do your commute on a bike. A strange omission, if you ask me.

That left the Laptop Messenger or the Classic messenger. Medium seemed to be the size I was after and I went with the Classic because I already have a sleeve I like (a Waterfield Designs one from 2000 that’s still in great shape), and figured every now and again I’d be travelling without the laptop so it’d be handy to take out the sleeve.

It fits the laptop sleeve and Tenba insert perfectly, I can get the Macbook Pro, Canon 5D, 17-40 f/4L, 24-105 f/4L, and 50mm f/1.4 with no trouble. I could actually stack another lens on top of the 50mm (say the 85mm, f/1.8) if they both had their own little bags. Fully loaded it’s not light, but not too awkward to handle.

And those days when I’m just travelling with laptop and some papers, it doesn’t seem too big. The myriad pockets make it easy to bring along extra small stuff and keep them altogether.

I got the stealth black one, as it needs to look presentable in business meetings, and I like that it doesn’t really suggest how much valuable stuff it has in it.

On the bike, it’s rock solid (as you’d expect from a bag company started by couriers), and the cross strap does a good job.

The cons? The velcro is loud if you were looking for something in a movie theatre, and the padded cellphone pocket is a bit short for an iPhone (or put another way, the iPhone’s taller than most cellphones). The off the shelf classic messenger doesn’t come with a grab strap on the top, so getting it in and out of cars (for example) isn’t as easy as it could be. (If you build a custom bag, you can spec one).

But these minor complaints don’t take away from my happiness at sorting out a bag that I can use every day, and carry a laptop and a bunch of camera stuff when I have to.

It’s fast, focuses quickly and seems to share with the 28mm f/1.8 a richness of color that makes ho-hum shots look good and good shots look great.

(If I ever take any great shots, I’ll be fascinated to see what it does with them).

(More after the jump)

Going long

A crop body like my Rebel XT (350D) turns it into a pretty long 136mm equivalent focal length. That’s a bit too much indoors for anything but the tightest headshot (but might be handy for candid portraits at a wedding, for example).

I could also see it being useful for some indoor sports shooting where the light wasn’t that great.

I bought it (secondhand for a good price on eBay with the lens hood included) partly in anticipation of getting a used full-frame 5D next year, when it will (more or less) replicate the reach my nifty fifty (EF 50mm f/1.8) gets on the Rebel XT.

A certain something

But even on a crop body it’s a great portrait lens. Bokeh is pleasing, and it’s contrasty with really satisfying color rendition.

Can you tell I’m really fond of it already?

It’s also light and smallish (but longer than the 28mm or 50mm primes), so is unobtrusive and doesn’t take up too much room in a bag.

On the other hand

The lens hood clamps onto the lens, rather than screwing on which makes it seem only flimsily attached. It hasn’t fallen off yet, but it’s not as solid as the 24-105mm f/4L hood that makes you feel you bang in nails with it.

And on my (used) version the focus ring is slightly loose, but since I almost always autofocus, that’s not really a problem.

The minimum focus distance seems long to me, which is a shame, as it would be nice to be able to get in really tight for some macro-ish details.

Summary and Sample images

Fast, light and affordable, with great results. A welcome addition to my range of lens options.

While talking to Chuck West, the pro photographer who accompanied us on the cattle drive (shown here – the cowboy photographer at work), he made an interesting point about the choice of lenses he’d made for the trip. (I was on assignment from a magazine to write an article about the trip, so only taking photos in an amateur capacity.)

He uses a Canon 5D (which is a full-frame camera), and he only brought the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L with him. Space was at a premium, and we were going to be on horses all day, so lots of lenses (and lots of lens changing) wasn’t on.

The 24-105mm clearly makes most sense on a full-frame camera, where you could go from genuinely wide to pretty zoomed, and so don’t need an additional wide-angle lens most of the time.

On a crop body like my XT, it’s equivalent to 38-160mm, which might give you some extra reach, but isn’t actually as useful.

If you were trying to cover around the same 24-105mm range on a crop sensor camera, I guess you’d go for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, and while it gets some pretty good reviews, its main strength seems to be versatility rather than flat-out image quality. I can’t see pros like Chuck going for it.

So even if you had a swanky new 50D, for this job you’d be carrying two lenses – maybe the pricey but good EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM and something else for the long end.

Upgrade paths

I’ve been pretty comfortable swapping lenses a lot – I love shooting with the 2 primes I have, so they’re often on and off the camera in conjunction with one or other of the zooms I use. But Chuck’s stripped-down kit got me thinking about my upgrade plans.

With the imminent arrival of the 5D Mark II, I’m actually thinking that a used 5D might be my next camera.

A used 5D would only be slightly more expensive than a new Canon 50D
– the other camera I was thinking of.

But for me, the 5D has benefits beyond the lens fitting convenience. The chief of them being image quality.

I don’t think the 50D’s Live View or higher MP count will really mean much too me, especially as it seems the 50D’s 15 MP count has come at the expense of marginal (at best) improvement in image quality over the 40D.

It’s true the LCD’s better than the 5D’s, and the frame rate is faster, but again, I don’t know if those things really make enough difference to me.

I’m still not decided, and it’ll be next year before I plump for one or the other, but right now I’m leaning 5D.

To ward off dissatisfaction from prints, and make sure all my editing adjustments weren’t making things worse not better, I recently bought a Color Vision Spyder2 Express Colorimeter to calibrate my laptop screen, and my 2 LCD screens (one at home, one at work).

Like falling off a log

Setting it up and using the thing – which looks like a silver shrunken version of those boardroom table speakerphones – was very straightforward.

The software talks you through the whole process, and I followed the instructions about using with subdued ambient light to get a good calibration. Soon I had my laptop screen looking better than ever before. So far so good.

Multiple monitors hack

The Spyder2 Express is meant for consumers not pros, and one area in which it’s limited is in its support for multiple monitors. At first glance, since it automatically saves every profile with the same name, you can only use it with one monitor at a time.

But with a small amount of ingenuity, you can bypass this. You just rename the first profile you’ve set up, so it won’t be overwritten when you create a new profile for your next monitor. I’ve got three monitors calibrated this way, and there’s no limit to the number you could set up this way – for example, since I use my laptop at home and in the office, I should really have separate profiles for each location.

There’s more information in this thread on the MacRumors forum.

Soon I had all my monitors looking much better, and also much more like each other. There’s also an automatic nag you can set to remind you to recalibrate at intervals.

Conclusion

If I was doing lots of printing myself, I’d probably spend a bit more to setup a completely calibrated workflow involving my printer as well, but the ColorVision Spyder2 Express is definitely worth the $60-$70 for peace of mind when processing your images.

Back to the 50mm way of seeing

On my cropped Rebel XT, the classic 50mm prime turns into a useful but tall 80mm portrait lens.

This is particularly noticeable indoors, where you find yourself backing up against a wall to fit in a headshot of two people standing next to each other. The solution: a 28mm prime that equates to nearly a 45mm lens on my camera body.

The 50mm is considered the classic focal length on 35mm film and full-frame sensor DSLRs because it approximates the field of view of the human eye.

So on the 1.6 crop bodies from Canon, this 28mm delivers the same comfortable field of vision in a fast, contrasty lens with much better build quality than the (admittedly much cheaper) nifty fifty.

Quiet Competence

The 28mm f/1.8 is quietly competent rather than spectacular, but is very handy in many circumstances. Its speed make it useful indoors or in low light (I shot a whole photo essay at the great River of Lights show in Albuquerque with it).

Its small size and modest weight make it unobtrusive for street photography or bringing to events when you don’t want to look like a paparazzo.

The pretty good minimum focussing distance mean that if you don’t mind zooming with your feet, you can still fill the frame with your subject.

But (unlike the 50mm on a crop body) you can also resist the temptation in portraiture just to go in tight on the head and shoulders, with the 28mm giving the subject room to breathe.

I have to say it’s slightly less sharp than my nifty fifty (at lower apertures, anyway), but that’s only noticeable when i do pixel peeping on my computer. What is noticeable immediately, however, is the rich and natural colour rendition.

The focussing is fast and accurate, and the full-time manual focus ring is handy and smooth.

Downsides

Not that many, if you can afford it. It’s way cheaper than the 28mm L lens, well-built and very useful. The 50mm version at this level goes down to f/1.4 so you could count its f/1.8 against it, but that’s being harsh.

Conclusion

Ken Rockwell has a very different approach to photography and reviewing than I do, but I have to agree with him on this lens – just get one.

Even with the apparently more useful and definitely much more expensive Canon 24-105mm L at my disposal, if I’m just leaving my camera out to be ready to take random pictures, my 28mm f/1.8 is the lens that’s most likely to be on it.

Sample images

Life through a lens

I have a soft spot for this lens – the Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4 USM (a bargain at $230), even though I no longer own it.

It was given to me by my mother-in-law when she upgraded her film SLR to digital, and it was partly responsible for reviving my interest in photography.

So, for that, I’ll always owe it a lot.

A good all-rounder

If you’re upgrading from a basic kit lens, the 28-105mm might be a good place to start. Its range is pretty good – 105mm on a 1.6x crop camera like the Rebel XTi is quite long, but you might find 28mm isn’t wide enough for landscapes – it’s nearly equivalent to 50mm on a film or full-frame digital camera.

The USM means focussing is fast and accurate, and the colors and contrast are acceptable.

I was very happy with a lot of the shots I took with it, and while the sharpness and overall quality don’t match the 24-105mm L I replaced it with, there can be no complaints about that, given its price.

On the downside

Given its lowest aperture is a variable f/4.5 to f/5, it struggles in low light. Which in this case means indoors in daytime, unless you’re in a sun-filled room.

You could try and jack up your ISO, but a better option if this is your main lens would be a cheap prime (like the $70 Canon 50mm f/1.8) as your indoor alternative.

Zoomed in, the lens extends considerably in length, and the whole thing starts to feel a little creaky and wobbly. It never caused me any troubles, but long-term, I’d worry about its reliability. In fact, my copy was my mother-in-law’s replacement for an earlier copy that ground to a halt when dust and dirt found their way in (there are no seals).

Conclusion

The Canon 28-105mm is a relatively inexpensive competent performer, and a few years ago it would have been a unequivocally good choice. Now, though I’d look at a few other lenses too – the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, and Canon EF 17-85mm IS, for example.

They’re twice as much, though, so if you’re not shooting every day, and don’t do a lot of landscape photography, this might work out well for you.

In my case, it was rewarding enough to make me buy a whole bunch of more expensive lenses. So if you’re aware that it might be a gateway lens that could eventually lead you astray, buy it and have fun.

It’s not directly relevant to me (no studio, no portrait or wedding business), but I got the idea when I opened a flat box today from Mpix.

I’d had a bunch of shots printed at 12″ x 8″, and while that’s far from huge, it was the largest I’d seen most of these images.

Laid on the dining room table (helps that it’s white), they looked great.

And I could see some patterns and connections I’d not seen before between the different photos, even though I’d pored through them in deciding which ones to print up.

Quality printing

The quality of the printing (If not the photography) was excellent, and I was pleased to see that the color was pretty close to what I’d expected – I’d soft-proofed in Aperture using the ICC profiles Mpix had sent me, and then chosen the ‘Do not color correct’ option with the order.

It was the first time I’d tried this, but it seemed to work well.

The aim is to stick the images in a portfolio book and shop them round the cafes in town (and other places that hang exhibits), and try and get a slot to show some work.

It was one of my resolutions at the start of the year (I know it’s May now), so I’ll let you know how I get on.

If anyone has some recommendations on where to get a good (but not too expensive) portfolio case (with plastic sleeves for the photos), drop me a line.