FC: Politech photos: D30, Shenandoah, Renaissance fair, Death Valley

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Skip to the end of this message if you're only interested in the photos.]

If you've been wondering why you haven't received any Politech messages 
since last week, the answer is simple: D30. On Friday, my Canon EOS D30 
arrived from B&H Photo in New York City. I spent the next three days in the 
Maryland and Virginia countryside and didn't pay much attention to email.

The D30 is Canon's first solo entry into the SLR digital camera market, 
their answer in part to Nikon's D1. Canon lent me a D30 that I took to 
Aruba (http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/aruba-highlights.html), and I fell in 
love with it at the time. Naturally this means I can use the lenses I 
bought for my analog camera such as the 70-200mm f/2.8L USM and 17-35mm 
f/2.8L USM. Alas, the D30 doesn't seem to like my 540EZ flash, which means 
I'll have to upgrade to the 550EX.

I had waited to buy the D30 until I learned more about its 
higher-resolution brother, which Canon announced last month. That camera's 
called the EOS 1D, and has a 4.15 megapixel resolution, compared to the 
D30's 3.25 megapixels. It has a bunch of other features like 
weatherproofing and better autofocus that might come in handy -- but then 
again its list price is $6,500. (http://www.usa.canon.com/EOS-1D/)

You can find the D30 as low as $1,600 if you don't mind grey market units 
without warranties, software, batteries, cables, and so on. I was tempted 
to do that, but if you add the cost of said software, batteries, chargers, 
and cables by buying them piecemeal, and factor in a Canon promotion, the 
cost difference shrinks to a few hundred dollars.

Canon started the promotion last month, and it lasts until the end of the 
year: Buy a D30 from an authorized Canon dealer and get a spare battery and 
1GB IBM microdrive (about $350-$375 street price) via mail-in rebate. Also, 
the review unit Canon lent me had an unsettling problem in that it would 
sometimes take photos with just a few lines of the image at the bottom (the 
rest was blank). Perhaps it was an early prototype or maybe it was damaged 
by being shipped around to so many people, but I decided to get the 
warranty. I ended up buying the D30 for $2,500 from B&H Photo, which 
shipped it and a vertical grip (which lets you use two batteries and is a 
must for even partly-serious shooting) the same day.

Two years ago I wrote that new camera purchasers might want to consider 
analog over digital 
(http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,33244,00.html). I stand by 
most of what I said, especially given the continued trend among digital 
camera manufacturers to focus on gadgets over utility and performance. 
That's understandable, if not laudable, because it's easier to write 
whizzy-if-not-very-useful software than to improve processing speed and 
other hardware aspects of digital cameras. I borrowed a friend's new Canon 
digital point-and-shoot recently 
(http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/G1/index.html), and found it just as 
limiting as the Nikon Coolpix 9xx line. By contrast, if you don't mind a 
fixed 35/3.5 lens, the Yashica T4 Super is a respected $150 analog camera 
that generally outperforms consumer-grade digitals in terms of image quality.

But the D30 is an SLR, and it's designed more with performance and utility 
in mind. The user interface is excellent, and it prioritizes shooting -- so 
whenever you press the shutter button, the camera fires. It has small but 
important touches inherited from its analog predecessors, like moving the 
autofocus feature off of the shutter release button, giving full-time 
manual focus. The excellent rechargeable lithium batteries last for a full 
day's shooting with frequent use of the LCD screen set at its brightest. A 
1 GB microdrive will store 800-1000 images in high-res JPEG format (much 
less if you use RAW images, which I haven't experimented with yet).

Head-to-head tests by a Toronto photographer show the D30 outperforms 
Provia, Fuji's excellent 35mm slide film, which I also use, at ISO 100 
(http://www.luminous-landscape.com/d30_vs_film.htm) and ISO 400 
(http://www.luminous-landscape.com/iso100-400.htm).

The biggest downside of the camera is that because the D30's sensor is 
smaller than 35 mm film, it has an effective lens multiplier of 1.6. That 
means my 17-35 mm ultra-wide becomes a far less interesting 27-56 mm 
moderate wideangle lens. On the flip side, my 400 mm lens-with-extender 
becomes a 640 mm bird-stalker. Canon has announced a 16-35 mm that's 
designed to give the D30 and 1D a bit more space at the wide end.

I spent Saturday afternoon at Maryland's Renaissance Festival, and you can 
see some photos here:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/renaissance-festival-oct01.html
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/renaissance-festival-jousts-oct01.html

Sunday night I stayed in a cabin in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, 
and explored Skyline drive -- one of my favorite places during autumn 
foliage season -- yesterday:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/shenandoah-autumn-foliage.html
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/shenandoah-river.html

A borrowed D30 in July gave me these photos of Death Valley, which I'm 
quite pleased with:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/death-valley.html
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/death-valley-sand-dunes.html

-Declan




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