Today or tomorrow I’ll be officially breaking up with Nikon. We’ve been together for over 7 years now. It’s not easy to do, but my new love is pretty amazing. Not totally perfect but pretty damn close.

Overall, I think that Canon is innovating a bit more rapidly than Nikon and probably will continue to do so, especially when it comes to integrating video into the camera, which makes sense since they’ve been making great stand-alone video cameras for years unlike Nikon- and this matters to me because I’ve started providing some video services for … See Moreclients, and I don’t want to have to carry 2 cameras (1 stills, 1 video) to do the job if I can help it. Specifically from a still photo standpoint, the 5d2 has 21MP compared to Nikon D700′s 12MP. That’s a huge difference and it would be useful for me, especially in commercial images where we sometimes need to crop a bit and the final product is going on a bus poster for instance. Also the lenses, while apparently not quite as good as Nikon’s apparently, are also more affordable, usually by about $500 or so; and I doubt that the difference in quality is equivalent to the difference in price. Downsides are that my hands merge like a Navi tail (Avatar) with the Nikon controls, and I’ll have to retrain myself with Canon’s layout. And apparently it’s not as savvy focusing in low-light as Nikon, but again it’s probably not a big enough problem to outweigh all the advantages. If the Nikon D3S had more MP and was a bit more affordable, it could be my answer, EXCEPT that since I travel abroad a lot, it’s giant size is just way too conspicuous. I think I’ll really miss the ergonomics and the build-quality of Nikon, and they’ll probably release the camera I would want right now in early Fall (on shelves at the end of the year) but I can’t wait that long, and by then Canon will probably be announcing their replacement for the 5DM2 which will blow everyone’s mind and again be a generation ahead of what Nikon’s got out.

Olympic Torch Protests, originally uploaded by 88ZERO.

Last week I went and photographed the Olympic Torch protests in the city. It was a very surreal scene- a huge pro-Chinese presence that tried to confront and contain pro-Tibetan protesters. Many of the pro-Chinese protesters had been bussed in from outlying areas by the Chinese embassy; and the basic idea was to try and dilute or mask the Tibetan protesters. One tactic I noticed was the flanking of flags- a Tibetan flag would go up and soon two Chinese flags would be brought near it and would sandwich it so that it would be far less visible. As a result, most of the Tibetan protesters remained on the move, trying to maximize their impact. The pro-Chinese supporters also tried to neutralize the Tibet supporters in the auditory sense as well, carrying bullhorns and using them next to pro-Tibet protesters using bullhorns. The result was simply noise- this epitomized most of what I saw- just a lot of screaming at one another; often it would begin in a relatively civilized debate-like manner but in less than a minute would devolve into name-calling, pointing, and fury. Surprisingly with all the intentionally antagonizing (chanting “One dolla, one dolla” behind a group of Chinese supporters, or “Dalai Liar” next to Tibetan supporters) I never observed any violence; it always seemed to push as close to the edge as possible, but strangely never seemed in threat of going too far. Like most people there, I didn’t see the torch since they whisked it off to a random street to run along for a couple of bus before it hit the bus and went to the airport, but also I think like most people there, I didn’t really care- this was more about the protests than the torch.