Canon 5D Mark III Screen Trouble

UPDATE:
Got the camera back from Canon repair. Screen seem to be working. According to the paperwork, an ‘internal component was not properly connected causing noise to occur. The main PCB ass’y was replaced.’  A connection was loose so they just replaced everything? Ok, as long as it works. Hopefully this will be the end of the problems.

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If you regularly read my blog you may remember that I had to send my Mark III in for repair because the joystick nub fell off in late July. Canon did a fine job, giving me free shipping in both directions and doing the work under warranty as it should have been.

A couple of weeks ago I used the camera on an ad shoot which included a piece of sheet metal lit in a way that included all kinds of gradients across it’s surface. When we pulled the shots up on the camera there was all kinds of banding in the shadows, so bad in fact that we had to keep taking the card over to a laptop to check out the files and make sure they were ok (I wasn’t shooting tethered because Lightroom 4 doesn’t yet tether to the Mark III and I can’t stand the Canon software to do it.)

At the time it bothered me and I remember the screen being amazing when I first got the camera, like spot-on. So this morning during a bout of insomnia I got up at 5:30AM and dug up the receipt they send along with the repair and on the Parts Description line it says:

SCREEN, FOCUS 5PCS/BOX

Which says that they had to replace the whole back of the camera in order to fix at little nub, and in the process they swapped out my good original screen with a bum new one.  So I called CPS up again an hour ago and I’m sending the camera in once again to get fixed. Luckily it’s the end of the month of August which is when everyone who hires me is on the beach in the Hamptons so hopefully this will get back before I really need it.

Just so you can see what I mean, here’s an iphone picture of the screen above the actual picture file of a photo of my dark painted background. Please excuse any white balance differences.

Early Morning Street Photography

Walnut

Canon Service, Job Well Done

I couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how the joystick nub fell off of my almost new 5D Mark III while I was walking around Coney Island a while back. To condense the last post, it’s not the kind of thing you expect from a camera this expensive, so I called Canon Professional Services (of which I’m a bottom tier member since I rarely need to borrow gear) and asked them to do the right thing.  I was initially told that it would be an out of warranty repair and immediately asked to speak to a manager, who said she’d do her best to have it covered. They sent me a pre-paid UPS shipping label and everything.

Well I had shoots for which I needed the camera, so it took me a couple weeks to have a few days free. I sent it in last Monday, it got there Tuesday, they emailed me on Wednesday to say that it would be a covered repair, and it shipped back to me on Friday with next day Saturday delivery. There’s a couple of week days in there, but it’s pretty much as fast as I could reasonably ask them to turn it around.  If I were a Platinum CPS member, maybe it would have shaved a day off the total and they would have sent me a loaner for a day or two in the middle, but alls well that ends well.

The camera looks good, I’m taking it out on it’s maiden shoot this evening so we’ll see if there are any hiccups. They even updated me to the latest firmware that I didn’t realize had be released. Though I think this reset a bunch of my personalization settings that’ll take some time to get back.

I’ve dealt with Canon service a few times now, mostly for lens issues, and while there were some out of warranty repairs that I had to pay for, I’ve always felt like I had a fair experience. So I just wanted to give them their due. Job well done.

Canon 5D Mark III Joystick Failure

Earlier this week I had my 2 month old 5D Mark III around my neck while walking around the boardwalk on Coney Island. At one point I pulled the camera up to take a shot and noticed that the plastic nub was missing from the thumb joystick. I called Canon service earlier today as a CPS member and was told that I’ll have to send it in and I may have to pay for the repair. I told them that a nearly new $3500 camera should not be losing pieces of itself while hanging around my neck while I stroll a boardwalk on a summer evening. So I asked for a manager because there’s no way that this isn’t going to be covered under warranty.

After talking to a nice woman named Samantha for a few minutes the final result is that they’ve emailed me a pre-paid shipping label and if the techs say that it’s not covered I’m supposed to call her and she’ll see what she can do about it. I guess that’s the best I can hope for considering the fact that they’re taking me at my word and haven’t seen the camera yet, but I’m still a little worried. Will keep you all apprised of the status.

Kaytee Doll

Had lunch with my friend Kaytee on Tuesday. Some studio pictures led to some experimentation. She’s a good sport. Here are the results.

Noah Scalin

I took some new author/fancyguy portraits for artist Noah Scalin at a store called Evolution earlier this week. Noah’s the guy behind the Skull-A-Day project from a couple years ago. That’s an interesting place.

Also, I lit this shot with a $150 used Nikon SB80 speedlight in a $40 Adorama 16″ softbox.  You don’t need a lot of kit.

Canon 5d Mark III Corruption?

I had the weirdest thing happen to my camera yesterday while taking some portraits of author Noah Scalin. I was snapping away like normal.  On camera flash optically slaving an SB80 in one of those little 15″ softboxes (which worked AMAZING by the way, and like $40 at Adorama), everything was working just fine. I was about 50 pictures in when I caught the camera’s screen out of the corner of my eye, and the picture looked like this:

Artsy, right? But wholly not what the picture looked like. Looks like some kind of error reading the different channels off the chip. Not only the color stuff but also the weird noise over on the left edge as well as the fact that the top of the image was shifted to the bottom and the right edge to the left. And this was still in the RAW data when I pulled it into Lightroom. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of shots with various 5D range cameras and have never had this happen.  A subsequent shot looked the same, but the whole thing righted itself when I turned the camera off and on.

I almost wish I knew what happened so that I can make it happen again when I want to.  Kinda has a cool psychedelic late 60’s thing going on that would take a while to replicate in PhotoShop.

Anyway, am I the only one or have any of you had this happen?

Dead Baby Bird

Andy Ihnatko

Earlier this week I got the great honor of spending some time with and making some portraits of the great tech writer Andy Ihnatko.

Definitely near the top of the list of nicest subjects ever.