No major humpdates today.. This past week has been fairly boring. Jason and I spent the weekend at home, relaxing and enjoying our free time (well, my free time.. he was working most of the weekend). We did get a chance to go see Tropic Thunder, which was very entertaining. It wasn’t quite “the funniest movie ever” like I’d heard from some people, but it was a good movie, I would definitely see it again.

The biggest thing going on in the photography world right now is the announcement of the new Canon 5D Mark II. People have been waiting on this for years, speculating about what features it would include.. For those of you who don’t know much about photography, the Canon 5D Mark I is THE camera in the wedding industry, the vast vast majority of professional wedding and portrait photographers use that camera, so most of my colleagues were extremely excited for the announcement.

Today it was finally announced, and I think I speak for photographers everywhere when I say that it was underwhelming in every way. Megapixel count has been increased to a whopping 21 megapixels, which is more a burden than a blessing. Megapixels are used by the camera companies to dupe unknowing consumers into buying fancier cameras than they really need. In reality, anything more than three megapixels is pretty much a waste, and actually costs more in extra memory cards and time needed to edit the images.  ISO has been increased, which is just about the only good improvement. They added HD video capabilities, which is superficially cool but in reality a pretty silly gimmick feature. If taking video footage is your job, you should be buying a professional video camera, not shooting it from a DSLR. Frames per second is the same, number of focus points is the same, virtually everything that people have criticized on the original 5D remains unchanged.

All in all, it’s a pretty sad day for wedding and portrait photographers, in my eyes. Hopefully I can cheer some of you up by posting some of Mark and Jaclyn’s Day After session in a few hours!