iPhone 5 Upgrade Observations

Yesterday I got a FedEx delivery which contained my new 16Gb black AT&T iPhone 5. We were 18 months into our contract and didn’t plan to leave AT&T, so figured we should upgrade while the iPhone 4 still has value on the used market. In fact I think I’m going to be able to sell them for a price that’ll make our new phones essentially free. Free upgrade, can’t beat that.

This is not going to be a long post since the upgrade from the 4 to the 5 is not a monumental one in most respects. Yes the screen is taller and has better color reproduction, though I never found much fault with the old screen until I saw the new one. Isn’t that always the way with technology? Of course everything loads and runs much faster, which makes sense as it’s got a lot more RAM and a 2 generations faster processor. The speed also makes opening the camera and taking pictures MUCH faster than the 2 year old phone. It’s almost as fast as a dedicated point and shoot.

As far as physical characteristics, it’s crazy thin and really light; almost to a fault in my opinion. It’s hard to handle sometimes, or rather it never feels like I’ve got a good grip on the thing. I have yet to decide on a case, I dislike big chunky ones like the Speck that my partner uses,so I’ll probably end up with an Incase Snap Case like on my old phone. It is a  great option for minimalists like myself except for the factthat it has slowly broken and crumbled away over the year that I’ve had it. One crack and chip at a time. I had iOS 6 on my old phone so there’s little new there. I still think iOS is feeling a bit long in the tooth; it’s so 2007 when it comes down to it. Overall the phone really isn’t a great departure, it’s just a new iPhone.

The one thing that is revelatory is LTE. I don’t know about other places in the country, but 3G service on AT&T in NYC and SF  is almost useless. There are just too many people trying to use too few towers that are overloaded beyond capacity. If I turn off LTE at my house in Brooklyn, I get numbers like 0.26 Mbps Down and 0.03 Mbps Up, and that’s on AT&T’s HSPA+ supposed “4G” service. What this means to those of you who aren’t giant nerds like me is that I can barely check my email in most places in NYC. The subway line I ride comes above ground for a couple stops before going under again in the middle of my journey back from town. I had given up on even trying to check my email during the 4 minutes or so when I had a signal. It’s that bad. So simple stuff like looking up an email or finding my way to a clients using maps became lessons in frustration.

Well, LTE actually fixes that. Remember that with 3G I was getting 0.26/0.03, on LTE in the same spot I get 16.59/15.19. My call phone’s data connection is now substantially faster than my Time-Warner cable modem at home, especially with uploads. So I could read the news and check my email while I was eating some eggs at the diner in my neighborhood  this morning. It was amazing. They’ve finally delivered on the promise that all these companies have been selling me for the last 10 years or so. Let’s just hope the new system doesn’t get saturated too.

To wrap up. New iPhone 5 is fast, light, and thin. Almost too thin and light. Nothing very much new to see here except LTE which is currently rocking my world.

Android Option Letdown

Red River Paper – San Gabriel Semigloss Fiber Review

If you read this site or listen to the On Taking Pictures podcast, you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of printing your photographs. I try to print out a master set of prints for each of my projects.  It is expensive to do this and you need some storage space, but it is worth it. There’s something about viewing an image as a physical object which is entirely differentfrom seeing it backlit on a screen. For one, your perception of the print differs just by looking at it without all the light noise of your monitor (or iphone or ipad).  Not to mention that the print will still be there when your power goes out for a week during a hurricane (as long as your house didn’t flood). You may also remember that I’m a big fan of Red River Paper. I’ve been using their paper for years now, long before we had them as a friend of the show. In fact, the only paper on my shelf is from their shop. They make excellent products at great prices.

Recently, they released a new paper called San Gabriel Semigloss Fiber. Just from the name I knew it would be interesting, because fiber papers were always under the purview of the darkroom. Traditional fiber paper is an old technology. Basically, a heavy paper with a natural mineral coating (as opposed to a plastic one), though it tends to be little harder to work with. It’s more fragile and picks up dirt easily. It also tends to curl like the dickens when wet. However, it is very archival. High-end darkroom prints, especially black and white, are typically made on fiber-based papers. I typically use more heavily-coated luster papers because I like the saturation of colors and the depth of the blacks that normal matte papers can’t match, but those coated papers don’t ‘feel’ like a traditional darkroom print.

So when I saw that RR announced this San Gabriel stuff, I wrote our friend Drew and asked him to send me a small box to try out. He kindly agreed, and after much anticipation, my paper finally arrived in storm-tossed NYC a couple of days ago.

It’s a thick and somewhat heavy paper, acid-free with no optical brighteners and coated with bartya; just like the old school papers were. It  basically looks like a dark room paper without the photosensitive coating, which is just delightful.

Since I’m most interested in using the paper for B&W printing, I pulled out a photograph I took a couple of years ago of the ancient bristle cone pines in the Methuselah Grove (Inyo National Forest, CA).

Finally, a backlit shot to show reflectivity. As you can see it has a little glare, but that’s because it’s coated and not a raw paper. I will say that in person the quality of  reflection is really nice and organic if that makes any sense at all. Sort of a waxy sheen.

I’m going to do some more tests, but so far this looks to be my new fine art paper of choice. Well done guys. Be sure to go over to RedRiverPaper.com and get a sample pack or a box to try out. Use the coupon code OTP and you’ll get 10% off your order.

 

Underneath by Jes Young Book Cover – Behind the Scenes

About a year ago I wrote a post for the cover of the first book in this series entitled “Tab Bennett and the Inbetween”. That cover was a serious composite too, and because I never did get around to writing it up for the blog I thought I’d take the time to let you all behind the curtain for the making of the second one.

I should point out that Underneath, Princess of Twilight & Dawn will be out in the Amazon Kindle book store on December 30. I’ll be sure to update the post and let people know where they can get it.

The author Jes Young and I sat down and talked through some ideas for the second book. Just to get you up to speed in case you haven’t read the first book (which you should, here’s the ebook on amazon), the main character Tab was a young woman whose sister had died and is just learning the truth about who she was, which happened to be an elf princess with a destiny. On the first cover we visualized a scene out of the book where she’s walking from her house toward toward an apparition in the woods at twilight, and starlings are flying around over her head.

For the second, somewhat darker book (think The Empire Strikes Back), Tab is journeying down into an underworld to confront her evil father. We thought that a downward spiral staircase would be a great visual since it is a significant part of the story line. Tab would be dressed a big sexier, be a bit more badass, and be holding a bladed weapon of some kind. I liked the idea of making her pose similar to the first cover, with Tab walking down the steps, but looking back over her shoulder for danger. It would bring some continuity to the series.

The first challenge for this project was to find a spiral staircase.  It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do. But Jes (or course) has a friend who happens to own a castle, Osborn Castle at Cat Rock up on the Hudson to be specific. So in the fall,  I took the train up with camera to shoot scenes and elements which I could later mix together for a background plate on which to build the composite. I’d like to take this moment to say that this place is BEAUTIFUL and a special thanks goes out to Fred for being so gracious and letting us use his property.. So if you’re fancy and looking for a place to have your wedding or similar gala party, then Cat Rock should be on your short list. Fred was kind enough to give us a tour of the grounds and the house. When we mentioned staircases, we were told there was one off limits to the public up on the third floor. As it happened, it turned out to be perfect for what we needed. I set up my tripod at the top and took this picture. It’s severely wide-angled (28mm) and I know that the perspective is going to be exaggerated,  but I’m ok with that because it will just add to the intensity of the final result.

Pretty boring right?  Too bright, cheery, and far too clean for what we needed. That’s ok, I can deal with that in post. The important part is to capture the crazy meandering stairs.
What I needed was a way to grunge it up a bit. Sometimes, taking pictures of uninteresting things can be a real lifesaver, case in point: I had a picture in my library of an old plaster wall whose paint was cracking and flaking off. It looks like this.

I used this detail stretched across the original stair shot in overlay blending mode, which made the two appear to merge into one foreboding stairway into the unknown. Here’s what that looked like.

Simple, right? Well it kind of is. It may not be perfect, but because we’re going to do so much more to this composite before we’re finished, it’s ok for the moment. The next step is to make scene darker and creepier, and make the lighting far more blue than the original shot. In addition, I wanted to sculpt the light a bit to give the impression of a final window with dusk or moonlight coming in from left to right.Jes had also requested that we bring in the birds from the cover of book one, so I added that detail in. That leaves us with this:

Notice that there are some lighter areas in the middle, that’s where I am planning to add the model. Thenext step was to get my friend Mary to model as Tab. I pulled out some blue paper to make it easier to mask her out, set up a couple lights (one for fill and another to mimic the light coming in the window), and set up a box to act as the step for Mary to stand on so that her feet and positioning matched as much as possible.

You can see that I didn’t have a sword for Mary to hold. I couldn’t get it in time, so we had to make due with a small umbrella as mock sword hilt. I was happy with her expression and the angle of her body, but we added some later shots which had much more dynamic hair, so that it would look like she was whipping her head around because she heard something behind her. So-(delete) I looked through the shots and composited the hair from a later shot onto this one. Here’s a crop of the hair shot.

Now it was time to bring Mary into the background. I actually-delete had pretty-delete decent luck using a mask and the built-in refine edges commands in CS6, which surprised me because they have rarely worked for me in the past. So-delete Here’s Mary against the plate, with and without the shadows. Look around her feet on the shot on the left and you’ll see how pasted in it looks. Matching shadows and light are the key to making shots like this work.

The next challenge of course, was the issue of the sword. I had a prop sword which I shot and masked out and placed into the scene, but it didn’t quite jibe. Rather it was fine, but it didn’t have enough pizazz or magic or something. So I gave it a bit of a glow and a little specular/spectrum?? highlight to bring more attention to it. Here’s the before/after:

Much better. The only thing left to do was to add a bit of vignetting to make Mary stand out and make the whole shot look more claustrophobic. I also added the grunge border I used on book one; yet another element of consistency between the two to give them continuity. Oh and last but not least istype/font, again I used the same style I developed for the first book.  So, without further ado, the final cover for Underneath by Jes Young looks like this:

 

On Voting

WARNING: THIS POST IS NOT PHOTO RELATED. DON’T WORRY, IT’S NOT POLITICAL EITHER.

For those of you who perhaps live in another country or under a rock, today is election day in the United States. We got up at 5:30 this morning to get to the polling place down the street when they opened at 6:00AM. That way we get it out of the way and don’t have to worry if the lines get longer as the day goes on.

I’m not going to talk about the candidates or policy or my predictions, but I would like to say a little bit about the process which is in dire need of serious repair.

First is the mechanism
In my life I’ve voted in three different states. In two of them they used fill-in-the-bubble ‘ScanTron’ forms like the SAT tests used to (Remember your #2 pencil?), in another they used the big old machines with the levers like in the movies. Then there were the punchcards in Florida in 2000 which caused all the hanging chad problems, and some people use different computer systems, mostly from private firms from what I’ve seen. All of them have different rules, layouts, fonts, and workflow.

All of this seems insane to me looking down from an objective viewpoint. I understand that the Constitution says that the states shall organize their own elections and that we’re the United STATES of America, which is to say that states have some autonomy. However to leave this tragically important stuff up to 50 separate committees who I’m sure don’t get nearly the resources they need is crazy, and leads to confusion and massive amounts of waste in the process.

At my polling place this morning, you walked in where they checked the rolls to send you to the correct precinct desk, where they looked you up again, had you sign-in and gave you a fill-in-the-bubble form as well as some other index size card with some numbers and my name on it. You then go behind some dividers to fill out the form. Then go get in another line where some person takes your index card and you get in line to feed your form into a scanner. The scanner eats your paper and says “Your vote has been counted” on the screen.

First off, the people working there were polite and excited and trying very hard, but were being told on the job how to do their job. Don’t you think they all could have met up for an hour of training yesterday or something? Then you had to figure out exactly where you were supposed to go next, there was no obvious flow. I have no idea what that index card was for other than to say that I picked up a form from one person and then scanned it later with another. And the woman at the scanner had me put the form face-down. Heather’s person told her to put it face up. Which was right? Who knows, as there was no marking on the paper or scanner directions saying “place face down” or “this arrow first” or whatever. I know it said my vote was counted, but isn’t there some way to show on the screen, “Here are your votes as I’ve read them. Are they correct?”. Then perhaps it could print me out a little receipt so that I could prove whom I voted for if it ever came down to some kind of recount procedure.

Personally as a computer nerd, I think computerizing the process is the way to go. Simple standardized touch screen system of some kind. However the systems currently being used are proprietary, expensive, and seriously flawed from a security perspective. This should not be the purview of a private company.

If we’re going to continue to vote in a physical public place, this is what should happen:

1) An open source election software system should be developed. Based on Linux, signed code, & standards-based encryption for example, to make it completely open so anyone can look through the code for backdoors and bugs to prevent tampering. Security in a forum this public should not be though obscurity. Encrypted logs and printed receipts should be available. It’s all about cryptographic verification, transparency, and audit trails. In Australia, voting machine software is under a free software license as it should be. Nowadays the hardware to run this kind of thing should be very cheap and should become exponentially cheaper as time goes on. In 2004, India used a domestically designed and built voting machines to enable their parliamentary elections. Surely we could do better 8 years later. Maybe there’s even a simple hardware standard companies could build from. Smart people could make this happen.

2) Get a group of the top information and graphic designers, people like Edward Tufte, to come up with a simple template to be used on all ballots across the country and have it released it into the public domain. That way there would be less confusion on whom you’re actually voting for, especially when people move state to state. You could also use this layout to teach voting to school children so they know what to expect. It should be simple and obvious and easy enough to use even without instruction.

There are bills floating around Congress to do some of the stuff like I’m suggesting above, but I think they’ve all got to get on the stick and make it actually happen. Then again, this all begs the question of why we have to go to a location to vote in the first place. You could certainly keep public polling places as an option for those who don’t have access to the internet at home, but if the 5 hour long lines in Florida and Ohio have taught us anything it’s that there has to be a better way. Questions of identity could be dealt with. There are a number of countries in Europe that have internet voting systems for instance.

Gotta Do It
I wrote a tweet this morning saying that I took the ‘Right to Vote’ for granted when I was younger. The older I get the more seriously I take it (hence getting up at 5:30 to be near the front of the line.) However in America only 56% of eligible voters actually cast votes in 2008. Only slightly more than half, and that’s an embarrassment. It’s gone down in the past 50 years, but not by as much as you think. Even in 1960 the number was only around 60%. If you look at the number of women and minorities that fought for generations so that you could have the right that you’re throwing away, it’s crazy. Personally I think voting should be compulsory like it is in Mexico, Australia, Brazil, and others. Have an option for ‘None of the Above’ for those people who want to make a point, but have them stand there and make that decision. Our country would be better off for it. People would feel like that had a more direct connection to the officials making decisions. Kids should be taught that it’s not just a right, but their duty as a citizen to have a voice in their society.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. This is all to say, if you live in the US and are registered, make sure you go vote. The future depends on it.

Camera Strap Hell

I’ve decided that I can’t stand camera straps. Or perhaps that I have a love/hate relationship with them. I love them when I don’t want to have to carry my camera in my hands, but I can’t stand them the rest of the time. Luckily I don’t carry my camera around too much or this would drive me nuts.

I never use the straps that come with the camera. Partly because of the ostentatious branding, partly so that it’s nice and new when I end up selling the camera to upgrade, but mostly because it’s semi-permanently attached to the camera with the same system that’s been around for years. Seriously, can you people not come up with a better design than to have to snake the strap through the slot and then weave it back onto itself? Leica’s and Hasselblad have had a clip-on systems for decades. Why not steal one of those?

Speaking of straps that detach, for awhile I was really into the Op/Tech brand because the neoprene made them more comfortable on your shoulder. In their system you can remove the strap from the two anchors attached to the camera, but the anchors are still connect the way the OEM straps do. So you’re left with these two little pigtails flailing about and getting in your way.

Then last year I was so frustrated that I decided to go in with the sling style strap which screw into the cameras tripod mounting hole on the bottom. I found this LensLoop strap which is made from recycled seatbelt material and started as a Kickstarter project. That part is great. It’ll never break and it looks cool. The problems however are numerous. First the camera keeps bouncing and spinning around on your hip as you walk. Secondly, the camera is upside down, which is great when you lift it up from your side and it’s right side up, but means that the most fragile parts of your camera are the most exposed and again, bouncing around and knocking into stuff. I lost a lens cap I had for 10 years to the DC Metro because of this. The camera spun around and lens rubbed against me enough to dislodge it and send it rolling over the edge and onto the track. Finally there’s the problem of putting the camera down now that it’s got a big stick up it’s virtual butt.

Seriously, is there really no better way? I’ve gone back to just carrying the camera in my little Crumpler backpack even when it’s just the body and a single lens. Does anyone have a better solution?

Canon 6D Impressions

Canon finally released their mythical ‘consumer’ full-frame camera, the 6D, right on the heels of Nikon doing the same. Both look like very nice cameras which I’m sure will take delightful pictures, their sensors being of the same pedigree as the ones in the pro gear and all. As the price comes down the features that differentiate become more specialized and tend towards things like user interface and handling and the like. I haven’t played with the new 6D yet, but based on spec sheets and reading a handful of hands-ons, I’ve got some thoughts, especially on how it compares to the 5D Mark III which I use.

As far as overall image quality goes, I’d expect the new camera to be very similar to the latest 5D. A few less pixels that nobody is going to miss. It’s got the same screen, way crappier AF, is a little lighter & smaller and costs $1400 less. That’s $1400 that could buy some nice glass. And I’d rather have this body and an L prime than the 5D3 and some crappy zoom.  That said, I personally don’t mind a little heft in my camera and the 5D fits my hand perfectly.

A few people have written me saying that the 5D3 should have had the GPS and WiFi capabilities that are in the new 6D. Maybe. I wouldn’t have turned them away if they had, but computers are always getting better and cheaper (I would have loved an original iPhone with 4G too), plus for the kind of stuff I shoot, neither of those capabilities are necessary. GPS would be nice for landscape photographers I’m sure, but I only do that kind of work once a year on vacation. And to be honest, I sort of like having a memory of where a picture was taken in the internal map in my head. Clicking a link and having it open Google Maps takes some of the fun out of it for me.

WiFi on the other hand would be great while shooting wireless tethered in a studio situation. Assuming of course that it works that way. In the spec sheets that I’ve seen it’s designed to send pictures from camera to camera, or to a printer, or to a smartphone, or to use an app to control the camera from a smartphone. All of that makes me shrug. However if you could have it connect to and write the images to a shared folder on your network, well that would start being interesting, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what the engineers had in mind. I could be wrong.

Overall it looks pretty nice. Some people are saying that the new Nikon D600 is the same price with better features and that might be true. I guess if you were starting nothing you could choose one or the other, but I doubt the differences are going to make someone with an investment in one brand’s glass switch teams. Finally though, it’s just another tool. Nothing earth-shattering and nothing that’s going to make you take better pictures. That’s YOUR job.

 

Tripods – Polaroid Carbon Fiber Mini-Review

I joked at the beginning of this week’s On Taking Pictures podcast that tripods are for wussies. Obviously I was joking, mostly. To be honest I don’t use a tripod very often. I’ve got a old big aluminum Gitzo that I bought used a few years ago. It’s big and fairly heavy, but that doesn’t really matter because it never really leaves home. Almost exclusively it’s supporting my Cambo 4×5 camera if it’s out of the closet at all.  I’m glad I have it, but with smaller cameras I’m more of a handheld, ‘move around with it to my eye’ kind of shooter.

I know there are a lot of people that swear by tripods, people like my friend Gary Yost who called me out on my wussies comment from the show. He uses tripods to great effect when shooting time-lapse and long-exposure kind of work, and I would imagine for that kind of thing a solid tripod would be an absolute requirement.

A few weeks ago while on a job I borrowed a nice tripod off of another photographer. Carbon Manfrotto legs and a Really Right Stuff ball head. It was a beautiful setup as such stuff goes. That head was one of the nicer machined objects I’ve ever seen. But have you guys gone and looked at how much gear like this costs?  The RRS ball head alone is $400. Worth is based on the craftsmanship to be sure, but I can’t afford to spend $700-800 on a tripod that I rarely use. I want to play, but I don’t want to pay, that much.

Back in 2004 I went on a trip with my father out west for 15 days. We drove over 4000 miles in a white Impalla rental, through 12 states and 10 National Parks. It was a marathon and I knew I wanted to get a tripod for the trip. So I went and bought a nice Manfrotto pistol grip ball head and a cheap set of aluminum legs by Slik. It was a crazy mismatch of gear as the legs were not and are not up to the challenge. They were light and cheap, I think I spent $90 on them, but they’re shaky and flex in a way that’s undesirable for a tripod. So now Heather and I are taking a trip out to California in a few weeks and I had been thinking that I wanted something a bit more solid, but also light, so that I could quickly set it up on a trail and take a self-portrait of the two of us. Some nice night shots of the stars when visible would be fun as well. My attempt in Utah last year with the camera propped on the back hood of the car wasn’t really up to snuff.

So I went shopping for carbon fiber tripods that are well built and relatively inexpensive because again, I don’t know how much I’ll actually use the thing outside travelling.  A search on B&H came up with something odd. Apparently a few years ago, Polaroid of all people had someone OEM them a carbon trip and ball head. The price had come down since their downfall and the latest price was $150 for the 65″ version. That’s a crazy good deal if it’s any good.  Reviews on Amazon.com were very favorable and so I took a ride into town to the B&H Superstore and had them get me one from the bowels of wherever they call them up from. It was nice, and felt solid for the price, but for some reason I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Fast forward a few weeks and the trip is quickly approaching, so I took another look on Amazon and one of their ‘market’ sellers had 6 of the Polaroid tripods for $89. Only catch was that it was a 57″ version that I didn’t know existed. The height was enough for me and the price was right so I pounced on the deal. UPS delivered it a couple days ago and low and behold it was the 65″ version I had looked at in the store. Apparently the seller had a typo in their description.

So far I’m very happy with the purchase.  It’s light, stiff, and comes with a ball head which I think might be enough for the trip, though I’d consider upgrading to something a bit more solid in the future. Though the camera plate that came with it requires a screwdriver, the plate itself is a knock-off of the Manfrotto quick-release plates I’ve been using for years.  The legs have a very Gitzo-esque look to them as well. It’s a knock-off for sure, but a knock-off is fine for me. The only downside that I’ve found so far is that the leg extender clips are plastic and therefore might not last forever, but for $90 with shipping I can hardly complain. Crazy good deal.  Now I can say goodbye to those old Slik legs.

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.

——

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.

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.