Full Frame vs Crop Sensor

Canon 5d mk ii
The Canon 5D MK II has a full frame sensor and a recently reduced price tag

The discussion of a full frame DSLR versus a crop sensor (APS-C) camera just got more interesting when B&H Photo decided to offer an eye-popping discount on the Canon 5D MK II, offering the body-only with a 16 GB CF card for under $2,000 around Christmas (now back up to $2500).

While I can live without a full frame sensor, the concepts of “need” and “want” become jumbled at times, like when B&H offers a big discount on a full frame camera that I wanted anyway. So, it’s good to go back over the differences and remember why you select one over the other.

First, it might be good to understand where the term “full frame” comes from in the first place. Full frame means the camera’s image sensor is roughly the same size as 35mm film, or 24mm x 36mm. That, my friends, is a big sensor. And, when it comes to sensors, size matters.

Interestingly, one of the reasons you frequently find a Canon 7D being used on a movie set like Black Swan, instead of a full frame Canon 5D MK II, is because the APS-C chip also approximates a film stock used widely in motion picture production called academy 4-perf. PL movie lenses cover 16mm x 22mm and take a wild guess how big an APS-C sensor is? If you guessed 13.8mm x 20.7mm, you were cheating.

The bottom line is a Canon 7D with a PL mount can accommodate all those marvelous movie lenses. There’s even a place that will permanently alter your 7D to be a PL mount movie camera!

It’s More Than Physical

The physical difference between the sensors is significant, with the full frame sensor being closer to twice as large. That is both good and bad depending on the circumstances. Since big chips are harder to manufacture and have a higher defect rate, they are vastly more expensive. So, if your wallet has anything to say about your camera selection, you’ll likely end up with an APS-C camera.

sensor size
You can see the APS-C chip is slightly less than half the size of a full frame 35mm sensor

The payoff for the extra cost of a full frame sensor is in the detail you get and the low light performance. At ISOs above 1600 a Canon 5D will simply blow the doors off my 7D. Even though I don’t do that much low light shooting, that’s my excuse for wanting a 5D MK II.

Also, if you’re shooting a lot of landscapes or other fine detail, a full frame camera will provide better resolution at distance.

Notice the qualifier “at distance”. Up close, like in a studio setting, the difference will be extremely difficult to notice with the biggest differences introduced by the quality of the lenses.

What Strange Magic Is This?

It’s not magic, just that at studio and portrait distances a full frame camera is shooting largely on the center of the sensor and you’ll likely be cropping out the edges anyway. That’s why I can shoot studio shots side-by-side with my friends owning 5D MK II’s and they’re surprised to see very little difference in our final shots. However, were we to walk across the street to the beach and shoot some landscapes, they would remember why the extra money was worth it.

That’s why it’s important for people to have an idea of what kind of photography they want to do before selecting their gear. Buying the camera before figuring out your photographic specialty is the tail wagging the dog.

My decision to go with a 7D is because most of my work is as a PJ. Lots of run and gun, a lot of being bumped, dumped and jostled, and occasionally working in the elements. An armor-plated crop sensor camera is well suited to that type of work, plus I shoot a lot of video.

I was perfectly happy with my APS-C crop sensor…until B&H put the full frame 5D MK II on sale. Curse you, B&H, curse you. 😉

Shooting In Direct Sun

sun flare
The sun shoots a giant X class solar flare at us - by NASA

It would be great if we could schedule every shoot for golden hour or other times when the lighting is most dramatic, but the demands of scheduling don’t always cooperate with our desires as photographers. Sometimes you have to go when conditions are less than optimum and shoot with the helium ion key located 96 million miles from the subject and filtered through a 100 mile water vapor diffuser just where it is in all it’s harsh, sharp-shadowed glory.

No need to be distressed, there are always alternatives if you’re prepared.

Shade

It seems obvious but is often overlooked. The best shade for photography shades the subject while still leaving most of the background in daylight. Then you can use a fill flash to evenly bring out the subject, yielding the best of both worlds.

A beach umbrella also works well as portable shade when there are no natural sources.

The idea is to get your subject to lose the sunglasses so they don’t look like a mob boss and not have to squint.

Scrims

Also called “rags” if you’ve been in the business a long time. The film business is famous for using rows of giant scrims, sometimes called “scrim the planet”.

For photography the standard sizes are 6×6, 8×8 and 12×12 and come in a wide variety of colors, weaves and patterns. Scrim cloth can act as a diffuser or you can get different material and use them like a giant reflector. Most often a scrim will be positioned overhead to diffuse sunlight. Scrims can cover the entire scene, or just part of it and there are even gradient scrims available.

One word of caution when using scrims outside, particularly at the beach, a 12×12 piece of fabric on frame is also called a “sail” in nautical terms and that’s just what you’ll be doing after a gust of wind. Clamp them down tight and weigh the c-stands with sandbags or free weights, even if it’s calm.

Neutral Density Filters

This is one of those things anyone using their DSLRs for video will have in the bag but not every photographer carries.

For photography, I find an ND 0.9 is generally enough to bring full daylight into line. Again, you might need a fill flash and you also might want to add a warm up filter or set your camera’s white balance to “cloudy”.

I use an HD ND filter that has warm up built into it. I know just where I must have dropped it a couple weeks ago, so if you’re walking on the beach in South Florida and find a 72mm ND filter with a warm tint, I’d appreciate getting it back. Thanks!

The Hazards of Photgraphy

rock climbing photo
The best pictures are at the top. Ready? Go! - By Michele Campeotto

There’s a big difference between doing anything as a hobby and doing it as a career. That applies to a lot of activities but particularly to photography.

Not only do you have to take amazing photos, the kind of pictures that make people go, “Wow!” but you have to be good at business, understand contracts and be willing to go to incredible lengths for photos.

Anyone who thinks making a living as a photographer is easy is most likely a hobbyist dreaming of going pro or in another line of work.

Just in my own experience I have been punched, elbowed, tripped, jostled and spit on and those are just the ones I can attribute to other photographers. I’ve been threatened with arrest, more than once, teargassed even though it was aimed in another direction, camped in the pouring rain, had frozen feet from standing in ice cold mountain streams, been lost in the wilderness, pitched around in a helicopter, gotten food poisoning, been air sick and so seasick I had to alternate between throwing up and taking pictures. I could have easily ended up at the bottom of a cliff buried under a backpack full of camera gear on several occasions. Yet, compared to these guys working for National Geographic, I’ve had it easy.

If that isn’t bad enough, you’re also dealing with a business climate of continuously diminishing opportunities and constant pressure from low-price competitors. Very few organizations are hiring photographers and the few that are have a massive amount of talent to choose from.

Many companies that were traditional sources of contracts for photographers are now buying their photography from stock photo and microstock photography agencies. Even those agencies are being challenged by services like TwitPics, which reserves the right to sell images without compensation.

And, through all that, you still have to take pictures, even when you don’t feel like it.

I’m not trying to rain on any dreams of becoming a photographer, just trying to inject some reality into the dream. You’re not going to get there with a Nikon and a kit lens and it’s going to be a constant fight to make ends meet.

On the other hand, when it all does come together and you get one of those photos that changes the world, all the struggle seems worthwhile.

The Sunny 16 Rule

Outdoor photo
This photo was taken of a dark subject on a partly sunny day - If you guessed roughly -2 stops off Sunny 16, you are correct. F11, iso 400, 1/250th of sec

If you know about the Sunny 16 Rule, also called the Sunny f/16 rule then you’ve either been in photography a long time or are a student of the craft.

Sunny 16 is older than most of you reading this and reaches back to a time when the light meter was hanging around your neck instead of being inside the camera. It is one of those old standards slowly being consigned to history by the introduction of multi-point intelligent metering systems, though it will still be relevant to people serious about learning manual photography.

For those of you determined to learn manual shooting, and I salute and encourage that desire, Sunny 16 is how you get your settings in the ballpark for shooting outside. The rule says for outside in full daylight start with f/16 and set the shutter speed to the inverse of your ISO.

So outside in the sun, start with f/16 and if you’re using ISO 200, set your shutter speed to 1/200th of a second. If your ISO is 400, then use 1/400th of a second and so on.

It’s one of those guidelines that every old photographer knows and is fairly accurate for outdoor exposures. You can even use it as a starting point for partly cloudy and overcast days. For a partly cloudy day you might keep the ISO/shutter speed the same and open the aperture to f/11. For a cloudy day go with f/8 or, if you’re worried about depth of field, leave the aperture at f/11 or f/16 and cut the shutter speed in half. So for a partly cloudy day you might leave the aperture at f/16 and the ISO at 200, but use 1/100th of a second shutter speed instead of 1/200th for a sunny day.

Also keep in mind your shutter speed selection can also depend on your lens. If you have a 300mm lens, you don’t want to use a shutter speed less than 1/300th of a second to avoid motion artifacts. For a 500mm lens your lowest shutter speed would be 1/500th of a second. Make adjustments to the other variables accordingly.

Set your camera on “M” or manual mode and give it a try, I think you’ll find it’s kind of fun. You might even catch yourself leaving the camera set to “M” for progressively longer periods of time.

DSLR cameras today are marvels of sophistication and yet, for so many photos the “perfect” exposure is not always the most technically accurate one. So far no camera manufacturer has figured out how to duplicate your creative genius and I don’t think they ever will.

Organize Your Photos In 2012

get organized
Get your images organized with a backup drive and a copy of Lightroom

It’s the beginning of a new year and while you’re promising to lose weight or stop smoking, add another item to your agenda: Organize your photos and update your backups!

While flooding in Thailand has driven up the price of hard drives, they’re still incredibly cheap by historical standards. So don’t use drive prices as an excuse not to keep your backups up to date.

You can still get storage like this Buffalo 1 TB USB storage device for less than $150. For that price you can get two of them and keep one off site somewhere. You don’t even have to plug these into the wall, they draw their power from the USB port. It doesn’t get much easier or less technical than that.

A terabyte is a huge amount of storage. The Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk has multiple interface options that include USB and firewire for $129.00.

Online storage is also a possibility but I wouldn’t trust the cloud as my only solution. I use Photobucket albums for my proof size customer images, but never for production images.

While online storage is a better deal than it used to be, there are still too many potential pitfalls in end user agreements. TwitPics users are sometimes surprised to discover that their images can be sold to media companies and used in ways they may have never imagined.

The legal question of image ownership if one of the big photo sharing sites ends up in bankruptcy court also has yet to be determined. If you’re a professional, that’s worth thinking about.

The online storage I am more comfortable using are the ones that allow you to store your own encrypted containers. That way if the ownership of my files comes into question during bankruptcy or government seizure, it’s no problem as long as I have local backups.

For organizing the local copies of your images it’s hard to beat Lightroom. If you’re lucky enough to be a savvy tech user you can get a huge amount of functionality in Digikam. Unlike commercial software, which seems to feel compelled to change direction periodically, Digikam just gets better and better over time.

The only guaranteed way of insuring your photos will still be around 100 years from now is to print them out on either metal plates or paper embedded with metallic inks. But with good backup discipline and regular maintenance, you can at least expect your digital image library to last through your lifetime.