Tipstaff

< Don't know exactly where to post this, but I guess this should suffice until a mod can move it. >

I'm an old school boy, so I, for one, HATE auto focus on digital cameras. HATE IT. This isn't how I was taught to take professional photos. Every digital camera I had tried up to the one I bought produced crap pictures when compared to my 120mm film camera. So, one of the reasons I bought this camera, the Canon EOS 20D, in the first place was that I could do a silly amount of manual focusing with it.. by hand (like I said, I'm an old school boy). It was the only camera I had found that could match my 120mm. Also, the other 2 reasons I bought it was that it was the best 10 mega pixel camera on the market at the time, and it also allowed for remote triggering using a cable/button system (again.. old school stuff) as the worst thing you can do to a camera when doing still pictures is to shake it... even a bit. What does this have to do with the post?

Well, until recently I could never understand how some of these guys posting on eBay could be posting images that had such a high degree of professional quality to them, yet all they were using was a low end POS camera. How can their pictures be of the same quality, or better than the ones I was taking with my $2000 camera? Now I know why. See, almost all these guys were shooting with a Canon Powershot camera (some really crap ones ta boot). Not by hand, mind you, but by using remote control program called "PSRemote". Great for them, but not for me. Then I found out about a program called "DSLR Remote Pro" from the same company that supported my camera. So, I decided to give it a shot (parden the pun). And man.. was it worth it.

What these 2 programs allow you to do is take complete remote control of your camera from your PC. You can preview pictures before you take them so you can adjust for the shot, allow you to pick what spots to focus on by overlaying focus points onto a preview picture (and since each camera has different focus points the software compensates for it by only showing the focus points that each camera supports), pick and adjust for the lighting your working in/under (daylight, flourescent, tungsten, night, and so on), adjust your exposure length, adjust the aperature speed, shutter speed, auto sharpening, allow for continous or time delayed shots, color managing BEFORE you take a picture (including doing black & white photos), take pictures without a memory card (as you can dump them to the PC directly), adjust flash response to compensate for under-lit areas, and a ton of other things, but the best part is something called "Auto Bracketing". What Auto Bracketing does is that you can take up to 15 shots, continous or other, that are of varying degrees of light exposure, and blend them together to form one image... a sort of HDR image. Perfect for doing product or indoor shots (take a look at the DSLR Remote Pro page under the "Features" section for an example). Not only can you achieve a perfectly sharp image, but a perfectly lit one too. Truely an amazing program.

Anyways, there are 2 forms of this software. The first is for Powershot cameras called "PSRemote" that'll run you $50US, and the other called "DSLR Remote Pro" which runs $100US. As of now these are the cameras supported by each software:

PSRemote
Pro90IS, Pro1
G1, G2, G3, G5, G6
S30, S40, S45, S50, S60, S70, S80, S1 IS, S2 IS, S3 IS
A30, A40, A60, A70, A75, A80, A85, A95, A300, A310, A400, A510, A520, A620
SD100 (Digital IXUS II), SD110 (Digital IXUS IIs), S230 (Digital IXUS 330), S400 (Digital IXUS 400), S410 (Digital IXUS 430), S500 (Digital IXUS 500)

DSLR Remote Pro
EOS-1Ds Mark II
EOS-1D Mark II
EOS-1D
EOS-1DS
5D
30D
20D
10D
350D/Digital Rebel XT
300D/Digital Rebel

Take a look at both products pages for more info. Believe me, if you use any of the above cameras you owe it to yourself to grab this software. Definatly worth every penny.

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