Canon T90
I fired up my Canon T90 yesterday for the 1st time. Wow, what a great manual-focus camera! Thanks Larry!
It includes a spot-meter with the best Zone-System implementaiton I’ve ever seen, far better than the spot meter Ansel Adams used (the Pentax Spotmeter V and then the Pentax Digital Spotmeter).
In the T90, you press the Spot button while pointing it at the highlight and then press again in the shadow, and it magiacally places each value for you. Now as you cruise the scene with the spot meter, you can see where each value falls.
To change your zone placements (exposure) just press the dedicated zone placement buttons with your thumb and the whole system shifts up and down while you watch evertyhing on the ±4 stop bar graph. Brilliant!
Oh yes — you can do all this Zone-System work without taking your eye from the finder, heh heh.
You can do sort of the same thing with the Nikon spot meter in most Nikons, but it’s not as easy or elegant, and Nikon meters don’t have the eight-stop in-finder display range of the Canon T90.
The Canon T90 works only with the orphaned Canon FD manual focus system, and only in RealRaw. That’s great news, because the best things about the Canon FD system are the fantastic 50mm f/1.2 FD L and 85mm f/1.2 FD L lenses that you can get used for cheap; less than a new Nikon 50mm f/1.4 precisely because it’s an orphan system. Whoo hoo!
I suspect the Canon 50/1.2L FD, which only cost me $350 over eBay in essentially unused condition, has higher performance than Nikon’s 58mm f/1.2 NOCT-Nikkor, which sells for ten times the price. Both the Nikon 58/1.2 NOCT and the Canon 50/1.2 L are aspheric, but only the Canon uses floating elements for perfect correction at every focus distance.
I’ve tested (but not yet reported on) the Canon 50/1.2L FD, and its performance is incredible, even at f/1.2.
Likewise, the Canon 85mm f/1.2L FD is another incredibly fantastic performer I picked up used for a few hundred dollars, and Nikon has never made anything close. Nikon’s 85mm f/1.4 AI-S lens is one of the best lenses Nikon has ever made (superior to today’s 85mm f/1.4D AF), but Nikon has never made any 85mm that comes anywhere close to the performance of the Canon 85mm f/1.2 L lenses, which use aspheric elements.
I just got my hands on another gem, the Canon 24mm f/1.4 L FD, which is very hard to find but still sells for a lot less than anything similar. Nikon has never made anything like this in 24mm, although Nikon’s 28mm f/1.4D is similar. The gotcha is Nikon’s 28/1.4 will set you back five times what Canon’s 24/1.4 will.
I’ve also got a line on a Canon 14mm f/2.8L FD, which has the unexpected advantage of being the smallerst 14mm ultra-ultrawide lens I’ve ever seen.
Screw the FD L long telephotos most people associate with Canon L lenses. The best photographs come from getting close enough not to need crazy-long lenses. The real gems of the Canon system are the L lenses in the focal lengths that matter.
For you modern Canon shooters, Canon is on their third generation of all of these lenses for EOS and digital cameras: the 14/2.8 L II, 24/1.4L II, 50/1.2 L II, and 85/1.2 L II. Nikon hasn’t even gotten off the ground on any of these, ever, except for the Nikon 14/2.8D and 28mm f/1.4D, while Canon’s current dash-II offerings are their third versions of each of these! The gotcha with Canon’s EOS and digital SLRs is that their AF systems aren’t as consistent as Nikon’s, so depending on your choice of body, your shots may not always be in focus with these fast lenses — whoops!
Of course I’ll have to let you know what sort of focus accuracy I get with the T90 at f/1.2; the T90 film is still at the lab. I shot the lens tests to which I referred above on a Canon T70 last year, and gave up when I couldn’t get precise focus anywhere other than infinity.
Yes, I’ll be reporting on all this as soon as I can, just like everything else.
D90 PDF Guide
I expect the PDF of the D90 User’s Guide any day now. I had to hire someone to convert it; PDF is beyond me.
Photoshop CS4
I just installed my copy, and also Dreamweaver CS4.
The bad news is that Photoshop isn’t smart enough to copy my preferences, actions, filters, keyboard shortcuts and plugins from the CS2 version I’ve been using all day, every day since 2006.
This is why I’ve waited so long to upgrade: it’s too much work to get a new verion of PS to work the way I was working. Apparently Adobe isn’t as smart as Apple when it comes to updates.It may take a week before I’m up and moved-back in to PS CS4.
Don’t try to get me to believe that Adobe isn’t smart enough to figure this ourt if they wanted to. Adobe’s registration and authenitcation system works great and seamlessly. Did you know that, ever since I think it’s version CS, that if you try to open an image of US paper money or stamps, that not only will it not let you open the image, that your name, address and other personal information are sent directly to the US Deptarment of the Treasury for potential investiigation? Adobe has your personal information from when you registered your copy of Photoshop to activate it.
If Adobe is this smart (the fact that it recognizes forbidden images so well is key), then why don’t my actions and preferences just transfer? Heck, when I buy a new Apple computer, one firewire cable and a mounse click are all I need for it to take everything: programs, mail, etc., and transfer them all to the new computer.
The only reason I’m upgrading is to report on it for you folks; personally, CS2 does everything I need and a lot more. Heck, every version of PS since Photoshop 5.5 has been fine.
Dreamweaver CS4
I create this site on Dreamweaver 8, and hopefully Dreamweaver CS4 lets me make long pages well. It does; the redraw problem has been fixed, yay!
More good news is it found my sites and my server info, so it unlike Photoshop, it was a no-brainer to start working in my new copy of Dreameavwer CS4. Once I installed it, which was a pain, I fired it up and it was ready to go. Yay!
Now that I have it fired up, did I get a bad copy, or does Dreamweaver CS4 just plain suck?
My copy shows text in Design View worse than DW8, since the kerning looks crappy like it did back in Dreamweaver MX.
When I hit redraw (F5), half the screen is screwed up, and the worst thing is that the windows don’t work right: when you’re working in a window, it doesn’t come to the top of the other windows (half might be hidden behind another window), and as you drag it, it won’t snap in place.
Am I imagining this, or has anyone else seen really screwy performance in DW CS4?
I can’t find the font size box in the properties inspector in DW CS4, so you’re stuck with the ransome-note style above, since I can’t find the places to fix this! I can’t find the spell checker either, sorry. I’m sure I will, with time.
