Yes, 21.

And HD video too?

Yes.

Cool.

Overall, I’m super impressed with the new 5D, in many ways it’s an incremental refining of an already amazing camera.  They added weather seals (not the bomb proof seals of the 1D series, but good enough for light rain), an AF-ON button and AF micro adjust.  The menu system is upgraded and so is the LCD.  All good things.

The ISO range is amazing, and the new Auto ISO feature is the most flexible and functional I’ve ever used (either Canon or Nikon), it even takes into account the focal range of the lens being used in determing shutter speeds in AV mode.  Cool.

A test shot (Straight out of the camera JPG, resized and mild sharpening for the web)

Canon 5D mkII, 200mm f1.8L, 1/800th, f1.8, ISO 400, 21 megapixel large jpg

The whole image:

The 100% crop:

I’ll post some video and some more thoughts soon.

After 2 years with Exposuremanager as our gallery host and product sales solution, it’s time for an upgrade. All the existing galleries will remain active either until they expire or until they get transfered over to the new system.

The new system is hosted on a secure server under our control. This gives us much more flexibility in giving great customer service and offering new innovative products and services.

Please check it out and let me know what you think, it’s still in beta (we’re still setting it up).

New secure gallery system

This change also allows us to consolidate all of our print orders to one lab (the best one!). In the past if you ordered in person or on the phone your prints came from a different lab than if you ordered online.

A few new benefits:

Black and white and Sepia options: The new software will let you see these options and add them directly to your shopping cart. No more need to make a special request when you want to order a print in B/W or sepia ~ Cool!

Saved shopping cart and favorites: Now when you add products to your shopping cart it will remember them even if you log off and come back later or from another computer. This is huge when you’ve got a lot of images to look through and decide on. Using the new favorites feature to narrow down before adding your selection to the cart is a great tool too.

Eary Bird Discount and clear expiration dates: The new early bird discount feature will give a 10% discount on any order placed within 5 days of the gallery posting. I love this feature! It’s less work for us to process orders right after an event, so it makes sense to pass the saving along. And having a clearly posted expiration date on each gallery is an improvement too!

Enlarged view and compare: Now you can zoom in each image and see it better as well as look at images side by side with the compare feature to help make the decision process that much easier.

That isn’t even all of the improvements, but it’s all I can think of right now. lol.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the service we provide ~ and I think this one is a big step forward!

Have a great weekend!

~Bill

On to the pictures. I don’t know anything harder to test new equipment than fast moving subjects in the dim fluorescent lights of a high school gym, so I went to the first couple games of the girls basketball district finals in Tumwater last night. These were all taken at either ISO 2000 or 2500, and they are very clean files.

The full set is here: Evergreen 2A district finals

Update: I just posted the galleries for the GU16 Soccer game, South Sound Futbol Club (SSFC) vs Synergy and also for the  Boys 2A basketball district tournament.

I started out at Tumwater High School for the Black Hills Wolves vs the Mark Morris Monarchs and then went over to the Black Hills High School for the Tumwater Thunderbirds vs the Elma Eagles.

That’s all for now, I’ll add some more later from the boy’s games I’m going to today (their tournament starts tonight).

Tomorrow Erin and I are going to a fund raising auction for a friend of her’s that has cancer and needs the community’s help with all the huge medical bills, we’re donating a little something to the cause.

“What’s that? What’s that you say? You say it’s Saturday? Goodbye, I’m going out to play!”

~Bill