Broken Mirror on my 5D Mk I

I suppose the time had to come when when old 5d would start to have problems. Unfortuanately it’s happened while Kim and I were in the middle of a 2 week photo trip.

I was taking a series of of photos at St Michaels’s Mount in Cornwall. As usual for this type of thing, I set-up on my tripod and didn’t look through the view finder again until I had to recompose. The first hint that something was amiss was when I changed the exposure and the meter was telling me 25 seconds at f20, even though a few minutes earlier I was getting 2 seconds at f22. I checked the view finder and all I could see was black. My first thought was that the lens cap was on, completely forgetting that I had been shooting ok at f22. A couple of off/ons and hard reseting by taking the battery out didn’t help. So, I took the lens off and discovered that the mirror was hanging off. Fortunately for me I didn’t have the front of the camera tilted down otherwise it would probably have dropped out into the seaweed!

I guess that the earlier shots had caused enough vibration to shake the mirror off its mounting. Whatever the cause, it looks like I’ll need to get it repaired. I think I’ll also get it converted to infra-red at the same time though. As it happens, I was intending to do this anyway once I replaced it with one of Canon’s soon (hopefully) to be released 1Ds Mark III or 5d Mark II replacements.

Fortunately, Kim still has an old 5d Mark I, so we’ll be taking a 150 mile detour as we travel between Cornwall and the Lake District to collect her old camera from home. In the meantime, I’ll be using my my iPhone (thanks to Dave et al for the suggestion). I guess on the plus side, this didn’t happen on our planned trip to Iceland!

Pocketwizards tt1 tt5 upgrade 6 for Canon

Pocketwizards have upgraded their tt1/tt5 firmware to add new features. But, as you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter or Google+, I’ve been struggling to get this sceanrio working:

tt1 on camera
580ex II on tt5
second 580ex II trigger by IR from first 580ex II

But, the IR trigger only works if you have the 580 on the tt1 it would seem. Unfortuanely, for me at least, this doesn’t seem to have been addressed in this upgrade.

Install EOS Utility on Lion (OSX 10.7)

Earlier I wrote about how to install Canon software on new computers using the upgrade software on from Canon’s Website. The reason I was doing this was to install the EOS Utility on my partner Kim‘s new Macbook Air. But, I bumped into another problem: the latest version of ESO Utility is not compatible with the new Lion (OSX 10.7) operating system.

Until Canon sort this out (and they may well have done by the time you are reading this), there is a simple workaround. All you need to do is install a previous version. I downloaded version 2.8.1 from Canon Asia, converted it to allow a new installation and installed on Kim’s new Air.

By the way, she’ll be using the Air for tethered shooting, and while I think Adobe Lightroom is much better than it was for tethered, the EOS Utility is much quicker for previews (using Apple Preview).

Installing Canon Software Without Original Disk

When you buy a Canon DSLR you also get copies of their DPP and EOS Utility software on CD. I use Lightroom and Photoshop for my post production so I’ve never had a need to use install DPP, but I do use the EOS Utility occasionally for remote shooting.

The only trouble is, I’ve long since mislaid the disks. So installing the software onto new machines seemed a bit of a problem because Canon only allow you to download updates, not the originals. But an article over at North Light Images helped get round this problem.

The solution is really simple for a Mac and is as follows.

Download the update version of the software you want to install. Let’s say for example you want to install EOS Utility from Canon USA. A word of warning here, only download software from a trusted source. In this case only from a Canon website, not from one of the many other download and “driver” sites. Not using a trusted source is a great way to add a free virus to your machine. Don’t believe the hype surrounding no mac viruses.

Mount the disk image as usual and then copy the installer from the disk image onto your desktop. Now we just need to delete one file from the installer.

For those of you that don’t know, the way applications are stored on a mac is different to how they are stored on say a windows machine. On a windows machine an application is usually a special machine readable file that the operating system “runs”. On a mac the application is actually a set of files and folders called a package. Using the mac’s finder you can browse around this structure and make modifications. Under normal circumstances this is a sure fire way to break your program, but in our case it will turn the updater into a first time installer.

Right click (or control left click) on the installer you placed on your desktop. From the pop menu choose Show Package Contents.

A new finder window will now show you the contents of the installer package. Navigate through the structure until you get to the SDI.bundle, highlighted in the next image.

The SDI.bundle is also a package, so right click (or control left click) to open this package. Fron this new window, navigate to the update.plist file as illustrated below.

It is the presence of this file that switches the installer into update mode. So, to turn it back into a new installation installer, just delete this file. Once you are finished, run the installer directly from your desktop.

Canon Rumor Summary

Canon Rumors have posted a summary of the current crop of rumors for new Canon kit. If you don’t follow this sort of thing expect to see some official announcements this Autumn (with a bit of luck!) for new 1D/1Ds & 5D models, http://www.canonrumors.com/2011/08/a-breakdown-of-rumors