Photos: Technical Info

Equipment

Cameras:

• Canon Digital Rebel XSi: Most photos taken after August 2008. This is my first SLR so I can't say much about it yet. I did try out the Nikon D40 and the entry-level Sony Alpha. I picked the Canon since the Nikon is crippled (e.g., no exposure bracketing) and the Sony is noticably heavier and takes much noisier photos (it does have built-in image stabilization though, which is tempting). Several trips will indicate whether I should have tolerated the few extra ounces of a more durable Pentax.
• Canon Powershot S1 IS: Most photos taken between August 2005 and August 2008. This is a superzoom point-and-shoot. Canon's S-series is up to version 5 or 6 by now and I liked the versatility of this one a lot. The newer ones have more zoom and a better lens, but are also noticably heavier, which is why I got an SLR next instead. The other downside is that the wide-end of the lens is only ~38mm. Nonetheless, it has tolerated a beating over dozens of trips and still works great.
• Canon PowerShot S200: Most photos taken before August 2005. This is a regular point-and-shoot. I didn't know anything about cameras at this time and picked one pretty much randomly. The LCD died after some water damage during my trip to Niagra Falls.

Lenses:

• Tamron 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II Macro: Most photos taken after August 2008. I had the Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 DC OS for a while but the image quality of the Tamron is noticably better and weighs nearly 0.5 pounds less. The only advantage of the Sigma is image stabilization which I found did not make up for its poorer quality even in lower light settings. (I guess there is also the debate about whether superzooms are even worth a DSLR, but I can barely tell the difference between the Tamron at any focal length and the more limited zooms. Of course, I can tell the difference compared with a prime lens, but I am not willing to carry that much junk with me while climbing. The addition of an ultra-wide 10mm-Xmm lens is tempting though.)

Other Stuff:

• Ultrapod II: Light table-top sized tripod (replacing a crappy mini-D around August 2008).
• Bogen Manfrotto 785B: Small full-sized tripod. I almost never carry this.
• Cokin Series-A Filters: I used a couple graduated density filters and a circular polarizer until sometime in 2008 and have since stopped because they scratch so easily and are a hassle to manage when hiking. I try to rely on post-processing now instead.

Post-Processing

Panoramas: Most panoramas were stitched with Hugin.

High Dynamic Range: I recently started playing around with HDR photos using Qtfpsgui and Photomatix. Qtfpsgui is much better at aligning photos (though this is due to its use of hugin's aligning stack), but I like Photomatix's tone mapping better. I'm still playing with some of the other packages too.

Other Edits: Before I got my SLR, I only did simple post processing in Picasa and (very rarely) some cloning in the Gimp. So far, I've found Canon's RAW editing tools sufficient for my SLR editing needs, but I may at some point try to re-learn the Adobe Photoshop pipeline (shudder :).

Album Generation: I use a custom perl script to generate the albums on my website. It takes an XML file with the text of the album and generates the html pages, thumbnails, and different JPEG sizes automatically. You can download it here.

In spite of all this, I maintain that I am not a photographer. :)

Last modified: Aug 25, 2008