I am going to the Galapagos in the middle of March and I am looking into getting the Canon 20d, I currently have a 300d. However, I have heard several rumors of an update at the end of this month, but it would not be availible to april. I am leaving on the March tenth. Should I go ahead and buy it now? Would there be a large discount on the 20d immediately after the announcement of the upgrade to the 20d at the PMA? Or would I have to wait till April when the new cameras are in store for that discount to come in to affect?
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Canon 20d
- Thread starter SpAtZ
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SpAtZ said:
Good question. I think the short/simple answer is that as of right now, you only have ~5 weeks to get a new camera, familiarize yourself with it, sort out any bugs, figure out your packing arrangements, etc, etc, so you really can't afford to wait. As such, if you want to take it on the trip, I'd buy it right now.
BTW, I went to the Galapagos a couple of years ago and found two fairly "big" surprises from a (land) photography perspective.
The first was that I used my telephoto a lot more than I was expecting. Since I was shooting film at that time, this resulted in me having too much ISO 100 and not enough ISO 400 speed film for the conditions (BTW, the same also applied for Underwater photo ... the lighting conditions were surprisingly dark at ~80fsw, so my default UW slide film of ISO 100 should have been ISO 400).
The second was a smaller-than-expected *minimum* focus distance. It was very common to have critters of interest at 6ft or less. For my proverbial 'next time', I'd shoot for being able to focus any lens down to around 3ft.
FWIW, here's some example photo's, and if you look down through these, my recollections are that I had min focus challenges with the 6th image (blue footed boobie) and 10th image (Sally Lightfoot crab)...for both of these, I had to "UNzoom" with my feet to move away from the subject to get it in focus.
-hh
My recommendation would be to wait until the successor is announced and pick up a cheap 20d then. You could always get lucky and find a cheap used 20d (I got mine for about $750 used very gently) but that's not guaranteed. The things to get used to on the camera are mainly the ease of control over the menu control of the 300d. I still haven't gotten used to everything but you'll still be able to take great pictures with it.
SpAtZ said:
Renting is always an option ... its just that it might not necessarily be a cost-effective one.
For example, I just quickly found one company that offers rentals on the 20D - - they're $70/day, or $280/week. I'd suspect that this price is fairly typical.
For a Galapagos trip, you're probably going on a 1 week cruise, plus you're going to use at least 2 days en route (gateways of Quito or Guayquil) on the way there, plus at least one more day on the way back, so you're in for at least a 2 week rental, which would be around $560.
As such, it would probably work out to be cheaper for you to just buy it outright and then resell it afterwords on Ebay.
-hh
Tamron 28-75 2.8
Tamron 17-35 (unless you have a lot more money, Canon 10-22)
As far as underwater, you can probably buy and then sell an underwater housing for the camera.
Tamron 17-35 (unless you have a lot more money, Canon 10-22)
As far as underwater, you can probably buy and then sell an underwater housing for the camera.
SpAtZ said:
SpAtZ said:
A) What's your budget?
B) Are you looking for a camera for UW scuba, or for UW snorkel?
FWIW, on my Galapagos trip, I did 2 weeks. The first week was the standard tourist "island visit" itinerary, and the 2nd week was onboard one of the dedicated Scuba liveaboards that goes all the way out to Wolf and Darwin. As such, in addition to a land camera SLR system, I also had my (35mm) UW Photo Nikonos V system too. Here's a photo of my Nikonos V system, to give you an idea of its size:
Note the two big, bulky, heavy (and expensive) strobes.
Overall, this not a system to go snorkel with, so what I did for snorkeling was to ditch the strobes. Keeping just the Nikonos V body with with my 15mm WA lens and viewfinder, its a compact (albeit heavy) system.
With the 15mm WA lens, when set it to f/8 and a ~2ft focus distance provides a DOF from 1ft to Infinity...this makes things easy when breath-holding
The electronics figured out the shutter duration; with ISO 100 film, it was typically around 1/45sec at snorkeling depths, and partly because there's no autofocus sytem, it has effectively no shutter lag. To put any SLR into a waterproof housing is expensive. The least expensive housing manufacturer is Ikelite...the strobes on my Nikonos system are Ikelite SS-200's. Here's their webpage on their 20D housing.. Also note that it alone eats up 8lbs of your baggage allowance.
As per B&H, this housing's a bit over $1200, plus you'll need to add to that at least one "lens port" (no, they're not included), which will set you back another $100-$400, depending on the lens you want to use. You now have a 20D for snorkeling and have only spent $1400 or so, in addition to the camera and lens. Now you know why my first question was budget.
To upgrade this to use it for deeper than snorkeling depths, you'll need to add lighting; figure another $900 for a single Ikelite DS-125 strobe w/cord & arm, or double that for dual strobes. BTW, my SS-200 strobes aren't digital compatible, so now you know why I'm still using my Nikonos.
Overall, I think the frugal alternative for a waterproof snorkeling digital system is to put a housing around a point-n-shoot. Canon makes them for several of their P&S cameras, and they sell for under $200 complete. I recently did this for a Canon A80, but have less than an hour in the water with it...what I found is that it can have *horrendous* shutter lag because you can be "sloshing around" and changing your distance to subject, which really messes up its attempts to auto-focus.
What I've not yet found firsthand on this particular system is how bad its backscatter is going to be.
For all photography, think about the path that light from a strobe has to take: it goes from the strobe head outwards to the subject, bounces off the subject, and then back to the lens.
What this means is that anything along that path will be illuminated, and for land photography, we usually don't think too much about this because air is clear. But water often has "stuff" floating in it. Here's an example:
A technique to minimize this backscatter problem is, in simplest terms, to not illuminate the water between your strobe and your subject. What is done is to move your strobes away from your camera lens, so as to change the "light path" geometry and thus, the light comes in more from the side to the subject, instead of from effectively the lens...to get really fussy about this, you don't want to illuminate "your side" of the particles in the water, because that's what turns them white. That's why my camera system (at top) has those octopus arms on it. The problem with a housed P&S camera is that they can't move their built-in strobe...at best, they have a piece of plastic that will block it off. This is a system limitation with housed P&S's and merely something to be aware of when taking your UW photos.
-hh
-hh said:A) What's your budget?
![HH_elf_Dec04.jpg]()
Note the two big, bulky, heavy (and expensive) strobes.
.....You now have a 20D for snorkeling and have only spent $1400 or so, in addition to the camera and lens. Now you know why my first question was budget.
To upgrade this to use it for deeper than snorkeling depths, you'll need to add lighting; figure another $900 for a single Ikelite DS-125 strobe w/cord & arm, or double that for dual strobes.
Ok, but how much for the hat?
@Spatz: Don't know much about Canon lenses, but I say bring your 18-55 kit and 70-300 mm lense. Also, I say stick with your 300D. I don't see much benefit of buying a 20D at this point. It wouldn't be a smart consumer buying decision, and it wouldn't offer much benefit for your trip. If you need some of the functions available on the 350D that you don't have activated on your 300D, you can get them activated on your 300D "somehow."
For this trip I am just going for UW snorkeling. I searched google and found this company:http://www.sealife-cameras.com/cameras/cameras.html
O and my budjet underwater is around $300. ($±100)
I also think I am going to hold back on getting the 20d since the megapixels are dont make a tremendous difference. However, I have noticed a large amount of noise in pictures I have taken outdoors with ISO below 400. Could that be improved with the 20d?
'hh,' Thank you so much for the help.
O and my budjet underwater is around $300. ($±100)
I also think I am going to hold back on getting the 20d since the megapixels are dont make a tremendous difference. However, I have noticed a large amount of noise in pictures I have taken outdoors with ISO below 400. Could that be improved with the 20d?
'hh,' Thank you so much for the help.
Thats at iso 200 or lower? You've got yourself some luminance noise there. Probably clean up in noise ninja or something similar. I wonder if aperture is that bad too. I havn't been able to use aperture for a while now (not universal). Take the orriginal raw file and put it somewhere we can all grab it with and try various meathods of raw conversion to see what is going on.
EDIT: Oh and I'm in the same boat as you, looking to offload my 300D and get a 20D or 'maybe' the new 30D that will be announced in a few weeks. I have a trip to the Antigua in march and have begun to find the 300D insuficient for what I want to be able to do. The 20D is easy to use, so just wait till you see prices dropping.
EDIT: Oh and I'm in the same boat as you, looking to offload my 300D and get a 20D or 'maybe' the new 30D that will be announced in a few weeks. I have a trip to the Antigua in march and have begun to find the 300D insuficient for what I want to be able to do. The 20D is easy to use, so just wait till you see prices dropping.
Do you have Photoshop CS2? Luminance noise reduction in the raw helped the buzzard picture (in the lighter feathers) a lot. But not so much help on the other. It should be noted that both are actually at ISO400 and probably exhibit closer to the normal luminance curves than I was thinking when you were saying it was shot at 200. Anyway applying luminance noise at around 50 to 70 did pretty good on both. And didn't seem to knock out too much detail.
For the small bird picture, applying photoshops noise reduction from the noise menu helped out a lot too. Some thing like keep details 80% and sharpen details 30% to the normal settings made everything grand.
EDIT: oh and PS is running like CRAPPOLA on my new imac. 2 6mp images open at 16bit color depth really hurts overall system performance.
For the small bird picture, applying photoshops noise reduction from the noise menu helped out a lot too. Some thing like keep details 80% and sharpen details 30% to the normal settings made everything grand.
EDIT: oh and PS is running like CRAPPOLA on my new imac. 2 6mp images open at 16bit color depth really hurts overall system performance.
jared_kipe said:
Thats great hear with my macbook coming! I barely can use iphoto 6 right now. It crashes sooo much. Tons of bugs!
How different are the controlls on the 20d. The biggest difference I have noticed are the wheel thing and the information being displayed on the top. Also, if anyone could reccomend a P&S UW camera that would be great?
HH- How is the Snorkeling there? Is it worth investing in a camera just for snorkeling? Is there a lot of marine life?
the Biggest difference is simply what the back wheel controls and what the front wheel controls. Here is a break down on both.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos20d/page7.asp
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos20d/page7.asp
