Friday, January 2, 2009

Canon 5D Mark II: Adding Copyright Data


I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon flipping the pages of my new 5D Mark II's manual, trying to figure out how to add a copyright notice and my name to its EXIF shooting data, with no success.

A friend with infinite patience (and truth be told, doubly so because he's not a 5D Mark II owner) took the time to really read the relevant part of the online manual, and suggested that I ought to install the EOS Utility software instead of using the CD as a coaster as I usually do.

To cut a short story even shorter, the copyright notice and my name are now embedded in each image's EXIF.

As a public service to those of you who are manual-phobic like me, there's also a link of the Canon Digital Learning Center (Gee, who would have thought to look there?) that explains all this in details much better than I can.

My thanks to Ralph Childs, who's a patient man.

PS. I've been testing the camera's video capabilities, and immediately concluded that its built-in microphone's quality is limited. So I've been using the external Sony ECM-DS30P stereo microphone. It juts out from the camera's side, but the audio quality is infinitely better.

NYT: Behind The Lens in Iraq #1

Photo © Max Becherer/Polaris-All Rights Reserved

The New York Times brings us an audio slideshow of a conversation with three veteran war photographers in Iraq: Joao Silva, Max Becherer and Franco Pagetti, three highly experienced photographers who have covered every phase of the Iraq conflict, and hosted by The New York Times’s Baghdad Correspondent Stephen Farrell.

Joao Silva is a Portuguese-born photographer who has worked for The New York Times as a contract photographer since 2000. The same year he was co-author of “The Bang-Bang Club,” a factual account of news photographers who covered the end of the apartheid era in South Africa. In 2005 he published “In The Company of God,” a photographic book on Iraqi Shiites during and after the 2003 invasion. He is based in Johannesburg.

Max Becherer is a Cairo-based photojournalist who has covered Iraq for The New York Times since 2004. He has also worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Times. He has been represented by Polaris Images since 2004.

Franco Pagetti is an Italian photojournalist who has covered the Iraq war since January 2003, mainly on assignment for Time magazine. He has also worked in Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa. He joined the VII Photo Agency in November 2007.