Oh well, no donations to charity yet then… 😉

Great new website they’ve got, a huge improvement over the old one (or it would be if ANY of the links actually worked, which they don’t!). Careers at AlphaOne – LOL!

And what about SOU-IOM and BLK-IOM services starting on Monday 21st November…???

EVERY single promise made by AlphaOne has not been delivered. Why would anyone be mad enough to book a flight with them now?

Andy

Jamie,

The 20D is comfortably a better bet than the 10D – effectively, the 20D replaced the 10D which is only available second hand now. The 20D has more pixels (8mp vs 6mp) and a much better focusing system, as well as a substantially quicker “wake up” time. However, you need to consider lenses too. Does your £900 budget need to include a lens/lenses, have you already got Canon EF-mount lenses, or have you got additional money to spend on lenses? If your budget needs to cover both camera and lenses, then you’ll be hard pressed to get a 20D and useful airhow lenses for £900 and in this case I’d recommend considering a second hand 10D and a lens or two. Also, if you haven’t got lenses, you might want to look at the Nikon range (although I’m biased and only recommend Canon!!!!) as I believe they offer DSLRs in your price range too.

Andy

PS: For airshow photography, you need to consider at least two lenses – one going up to 300mm (at least!) for flying subjects, given the distance between crowd and display line these days, and a wide-angle lens for statics

Ditto DamienB’s comments – I have had cause to use Photorescue when the file system on the card got totally f***ed up (pulled the card out whilst the camera was still writing to it – doh!) and I would unreservedly recommend it – in my case the only image I lost in the end was the one that was writing when I removed the card.

Andy

PS: After you’ve recovered the images, you may still have a problem formatting the card again using the camera format function or a standard windows format. IIRC I had to use some form of “force” format command in native DOS, after which the card was and has been fine for the last two years

I think its disgraceful that any school or club cannot find the five minutes it takes to complete the renewal paperwork. I think, if it was the club I used, I would have politely reminded them that if they wanted any more business from me they should find the few minutes needed to keep me current (admittedly the FTO I use is very good at making sure the paperwork gets done in a timely manner).

Furthermore, if the school/club offered to backdate a licence renewal in contravention of clearly defined rules, I’d also think twice about doing any more business with them – if they illegally backdate licence renewals, what else do they backdate (CofAs, insurance, etc???).

Andy

Returning to the original subject… It seems very likely that Canon will release at least one if not two new DSLRs later this month. This is likely to result in a number of older models coming onto the second hand market, although I suspect that they’ll mainly be 10D and 20D as the rumour machine suggests the new models are upmarket of those rather than in the 300D/350D category.

When buying a used DSLR, be aware that many are hammered harder than their film counterparts – how many times have you seen folks “machine gunning” with their digi – because large numbers of images don’t cost like they did in film days. It should be possible to check how many exposures the camera has taken – bear in mind that some digi bodies have shutters tested to 30000 images (which doesn’t mean it’ll fail at 30001, but it gives an indication of usage versus design life). Check that the sensor is clean (you don’t want to have to go straight into cleaning it), and that the previous owner hasn’t done an amateur job of cleaning it in the past and done some damage. Other than that, go ahead and buy if you can find a used body that is usefully cheaper than a new one.

Andy

The image data that I have found is that most images are 2240 X 1480 JPeg’s with file sizes of about 1.2 – 1.5 MB, clearly not big enough.

OK, well first up you’re not shooting at maximum resolution because 2240×1480 equates to around 3mp – I presume even Nikon have gotten beyond 3mp by now! :diablo: So first, ramp the quality setting and resolution up to maximum.

I have used this lens for about 12 months or more on film cameras with no problem and have owned various long lenses (300/400mm) over the years and have not had problems with hand held camera shake and I always used 100 asa, sometimes 50.

Yup, and I used by Canon 100-400 IS with 64ISO film and never felt I had a problem. But I KNOW I can’t reliably hold that lens at 400mm against a fast moving subject at the 1/250 I used to be happy with. Bang the shutter speed up to whatever you can get – shoot aperture priority close to wide open (but maybe not fully wide open if the lens is a bit soft there) if necessary to force the camera to pick as fast a shutter speed as possible – with a minumum 200ISO equivalent you should be looking at 1/1000th or so on bright days which should give you a chance for unshaken pictures (just beware stopped props though, although that may be for later initially).

I went to OW on Sunday and gave the gear a good airing, I used my Nikkor 80-400VR on the body, took about 250 images, most of which are poor by comparison to my film based work.

DSLRs are not designed to delivery perfect results out of the box – the images may well look a little soft, especially if you look at them at 100% resultion/magnification, and they’re likely to be slightly flat for colour too. With a DSLR you have to expect to do some work in Photoshop after the event (unless you really ramp up the in-camera sharpening and saturation, which as has already been stated is a BAD idea) – certainly some messing with the colour balance and levels will be desirable, and a pass with the PS unsharp mask filter will be required to.

All you’ve learned in the past with film SLRs is valid for DSLRs. This isn’t a dig at you, but don’t justify what you are doing now by your success in the past. We’ve all done it, and its only when we finally realise that there’s a new set of rules to learn for digital that we start to achieve success. The main issue is that with DSLRs there’s a whole new set of tools and techniques to learn and most of those are practiced with Photoshop or PaintShopPro on a computer, and not on a camera – if you feel that’s not for you, then you need a digital compact and not a digital SLR.

Finally, if all this talk about levels, colour balance and unsharpening is baffling to you right now, there’s other topics on this forum that have started to touch on digital workflow and I’d recommend you look at those too.

Andy