Monthly Archives: October 2012

The Christmas calendar

Never easier.

I wrote a year ago how easy it is to create gift photo calendars using Lightroom and a tailored plugin with the estimable Shutterfly online service. That linked plugin remains as effective in LR4.2 as it was in LR3.x.

So the other day I decided on a theme for this year’s gift calendar. Using keywords in LR to find the images I wanted, I put all like-themed pictures into an LR collection and then narrowed that down to 13 favorites – one for each month plus one for the cover. Invoking the plugin in File->Export I dropped the RAW files, converted to 5meg originals on export, into Shutterfly and some fifteen minutes later a dozen or so calendars were ordered for direct shipping to their lucky (?) recipients.

This year’s single theme idea came about when it dawned on me just how many snaps of the Transamerica building – 40 years old this year! – I had taken over the years in all light and weather conditions.

The 2012 calendar, featuring the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.

The city has architect William Pereira much to thank for.

Calendars make great gifts – time to make yours!

Out and about with the 180mm Nikkor

Trivially easy to use.

I wrote about my bargain basement used 180mm f/2.8D Nikkor here, appending a few quick snaps at the time. Having now had a better chance to wring the lens out I can say with great enthusiasm that this is a dream lens on an FF body like the D700. The focus automation makes picture-taking exceptionally easy, despite the very shallow depth of field at f/2.8, and the balance and handling on the big Nikon body would be hard to improve. I use a first pressure on the shutter button to lock focus, recompose, then click. Center rectangle focusing is bang on every time; I do not believe in cockamamie concepts like Nikon’s matrix focus technology when one critical, know focus point is called for.

Here are some snaps from yesterday (hey, the markets were closed so I got out!), all at f/2.8 or f/4 and all (minimally) processed in LR4. Taken on and around San Francisco’s Embarcadero. On the D2X the lens has an effective length of 270mm, a little too long for this sort of street snapping.

Spare the rod and spoil the child. Mahatma lays it on.

Umbrellas.

Lunch nap.

Pier 14.

Embarcadero tower – a poor imitation of the classic RCA building in NY’s Rockefeller Center.
They leave the Christmas lights on all year around, with the back lighting making them look lit.

Joy. This lasted all of one second and autofocus made it possible.

Lone. At the Hills Bros’ building.

Oakland Bay Bridge.

Speed Limit.

I trust the azure sky is not lost on east coast dwellers!

I so like the handling of the D2X with the built-in battery grip that I have bought a used Nikon MB-D10 battery grip for the D700, to confer like functionality. It adds the advantage that regular AA batteries work fine. I’ll report back later.

Meanwhile, it bears repeating that even duffers will find their snaps improved with a lens of this calibre.

Hurricane Sandy

Live image

From the New York Times comes this live image from the 51st floor of the NYT building, in what is still very much the center of the world as we know it. An intensely dramatic image of Hurricane Sandy rolling in at 12:05 am EST, October 29, 2012:

Best of luck, New York.

For some great photojournalism from America’s newspaper of record, click here.

MacMini 2012

Barely acceptable.

A year ago I warned against the MacMini 2011 for photographic use. Modestly powered and horribly overpriced, you could build a far more robust and expandable Hackintosh for less. Much less.

The main changes in the 2012 model are that it’s $200 less for the i5 base model, the cooler Ivy Bridge CPU has replaced the Sandy Bridge and the competent HD4000 integrated GPU drives the graphics. You still need to add a keyboard, mouse and Display Port-to-DVI cable. Buying Apple’s Dual Link (30″ displays) at $99/Single Link $29 is insanity, when you can buy one from Amazon for $12/$10 – I use one with my MacBook Air and confirm it works perfectly. You also need to max out the RAM, the Mini coming with a paltry 4GB of 1600GHz, up from 1333GHz from last year. The removable base plate in the Mini makes RAM swapping easy and Crucial will charge you $85 for 16GB whereas Apple will get $300 from fools. Looks like RAM gouging, an old habit of Apple’s which had gone away for a while, is back.

But the best news about the Mini is that it comes without Apple’s ghastly glossy screen known to every iMac user since 2007. You can have your pick of displays from decent 1920×1280 21.5″ versions from the likes of Assus and Acer at $140 to megabuck 27″ displays where the Dell Ultrasharp U2711 2560×1440 remains the best value at $800. All cheaper than Apple’s glossy 27″ abomination at $1,000.

The other significant enhancement is to replace the chintzy 500GB internal HDD with a $100 128GB SSD to store the OS and applications, which will return a significant increase in operating speed. Forget cockamamie dual internal drive cradles. That will simply make your machine hotter. Use an USB3 external enclosure for the 500GB drive you just removed. Drive replacement in the Mini is a tad tougher than RAM replacement, but reference to the excellent iFixit guide will get you there. Geekbench64 for the 2012 MacMini comes in at 7,500. For comparison my HackPro HP100 comes in at 12,000 with the i5 and 16,000 with the i7, both scores with the older Sandy Bridge CPU modestly overclocked and a five year old Nvidia GTX9800+ discrete GPU. That machine runs cool as a cucumber compared to any Mac. The poor scores of the 2012 Mac Mini are accounted for by the fact that Apple is using the compromised mobile version of the i5 CPU rather than the full desktop version used in my Hack Pro. The same i5 CPU in my 2012 MacBook Air (4GB RAM) comes in at 6,300 or so, for comparison. Bottom line? the performance of the 2012 Mac Mini is on a par with that of a four year old using the three generations old Core2Quad CPU.

AppleCare? Sure, go ahead and pay $149 more to insure the Mini for two more years. Probably a wise move given the egregious out-of-warranty repair costs. The parts in the Hackintosh mostly come with 3-5 warranties, the exception being the Intel CPU which is covered for one year. Then again, I have yet to have anything in my three Hackintoshes fail. Oh! wait, the clips on the Antec Sonata III case’s dust filter fractured and Antec sent me a new one free after some 30 months of service. Toyota reliability.

So $600 + $85 for proper RAM gets you a 2.5GHz Ivy Bridge machine which will work fine with Photoshop and Lightroom but is likely marginal with video processing. For the latter, I would remove the base plate, mount the Mini vertically, and point an external fan at the innards. A 5″ $10 external fan should fit the space nicely and is easily powered off a 12 volt power adapter of which you likely have three dozen in the cardboard box under the stairs. The sub-optimal cooling of the enclosure will be greatly enhanced. For that matter there are even USB-powered fans available for some $12. Forget about trying to upgrade the i5 CPU for an i7. It’s soldered in, and Apple’s $200 premium for the i7 makes no sense.

Typical USB powered 5″ add-on fan.

However, last year’s advice remains sound – for this sort of money and a little effort (and it’s easier every year) a Hackintosh will make for a superior machine in every way except maybe looks. And when you decide to upgrade to an i7 CPU for heavy video processing, lots of internal drives, and so on, the Hack rules. Click on Sitemap->Photography->Hackintosh, above, to learn more.

Alternatives? Nothing could be worse than the new iMac for seriously hard photographic use, and Apple has abandoned the dated and overpriced MacPro. They have made noises about refreshing the MacPro in 2013 but I’ll believe that when I see it.

Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 AF ED-IF lens

Wonderfully sharp.

The 180mm Nikkor f/2.8 on the Nikon D700.

I confess I miss the superb 200mm f/2.8 Canon EF autofocus lens I used to use on my 5D body, so when an opportunity arose to buy a used 180mm f/2.8 ED Nikkor AF-D on the estimable Fred Miranda forum (unlike eBay, it’s home to sellers with integrity) for just $375, I snapped it up. The lens retails new for $900. Mine has some superficial wear on the crinkle finish but the mechanics and optics are fine, and that’s what matters to me. At 27 ounces (same as the Canon) it’s 6 ounces heavier than the gorgeous 200mm f/4 Nikkor I own but a stop faster and with auto focusing. Worth the difference so long as you need f/2.8!

The lens, as with all Nikon AF-D lenses, uses the ‘screwdriver’ focus mechanism. A slotted pinion in the lens drives the focus rack and is in turn driven by a screwdriver attached to a motor in the bayonet flange on the body. A bit Rube Goldberg, perhaps, but it does assure compatibility with a large number of older Nikon bodies back to the film era. For digital users, screwdriver focus is still included in pro/prosumer bodies (Like the D2/3/4, D800/700/600) and in the better amateur ones (D300/300S/7000 etc)


The screwdriver pinion in the flange of the lens.

The drawback of screwdriver focus is that it is slower than the linear in-lens motors found in Nikon’s latest AF-S lenses and, incidentally, in all Canon auto focus digital lenses in various guises. As Nikon does not offer this lens in an AF-S version, if you want a Nikon 180 f/2.8 you have two choices – this lens or the much costlier and heavier 70-200 f/2.8 for some $2,400, weighing in at a porky 54 ounces. However, the zoom adds Vibration Reduction, sadly missing from the 180mm optic.

Balance on the heavy D700 body is excellent and makes for an easily hand-held combination. It’s even better on the larger D2X with it superior ergonomics. With the APS-C frame in the D2X the lens becomes 270mm long. The lens is light enough that no tripod collar is required for tripod use. The black crinkle alloy barrel is functional enough (as in functional-ugly) and cannot hold a candle to the machined, mechanical beauty of the early 200mm f/4 MF lens. Then again, nothing can.

As with the 300mm ED IF MF Nikkor, there is no glass between the rear of the diaphragm and the lens mount, so keeping a lens cap on the rear when not in use is probably a wise precaution to prevent debris interfering with the aperture blades.

Minimum focus distance is 5 feet, which is like a 50mm focusing down to 17 inches. Frame filling portraits are not a problem. The focus barrel has an M-F switch but it’s a bit funky design wise. Switch it to A and it’s locked, operable solely by the motor in the camera. Switch it to M and you can focus manually but the focus confirmation light (D700 and D2X) remains fixed and unvarying. Only when you change the C/S/M control on the camera’s escutcheon to ‘M’ does the focus confirmation light come into play and the screwdriver connection is de-clutched, evidenced by the smooth turning of the focus collar on the lens. Still, that sounds worse than it is because, for all except photography of fast-moving objects coming at the camera, the AF in this Nikkor is fast enough and is absolutely dead on accurate on my two bodies. The latest AF-S lenses have none of this MF complexity – just grab and twist the focus ring to override AF.

ED in the designation denotes the use of high refractive index glass for selected elements and IF means Internal Focus, the length of the lens remaining unchanged as it is focused. No external part of the lens rotates during autofocus for those into polarizing filters and the like. The extensible lens hood is built-in and does not wobble once extended.

The real beauty of this lens is to be found at f/2.8. What little vignetting there is can be automatically corrected in Lightroom which ships with the lens profile for the 180mm. My lens was recognized correctly and the profile automatically corrected both vignetting and minor pincushion distortion.

This is very much a ‘glamor lens’ and one you want to use fully open all the time. Backgrounds are massively blurred making the subject simply pop – these are all at full aperture on the D700 snapped while taking the pup for his evening ramble around the ‘hood:

Tar truck. Molten tar is poured into the seams where new road work joins the old.
This prevents the entry of water and slows erosion at the seams.

Leaf blower. Needless to add I got something in my eye….

Even apartment buildings can be pretty. This one is done in southern plantation style.

Typical 180mm full aperture rendering.

Last growth.

Autumn.

Should you opt for the AF or earlier MF optic? Both have stellar reputations. The answer is that the decision depends on what your uses are. Certainly focusing a lens this long and bright manually is easy. Objects snap in and out of focus with authority. If your persuasion is more on the candid/people side, as is mine, then AF makes better sense. If a more contemplative approach suits you, such as with architecture and landscapes, then MF is fine, and the lens will likely be cheaper. Good used AI-S versions may be found for $200-300 and adding a CPU means another $29 or so. Be warned though that CPU installation will require similar machining to that I adopted for the 300mm – see the link above. It’s not a simple ‘glue on’ job as there’s insufficient clearance between the baffle and the camera’s CPU contacts. It’s not difficult but if you are not handy with a Dremel and a file then this is not for you. And a CPU greatly enhances the functionality of the MF lens. The AI-S version is a couple of ounces heavier and the even earlier AI variant is 4 ounces heavier than the AF-D version. All have built-in hoods. There are also a pair of ‘non-D’ AF versions (the earlier with a plastic barrel which scratches easily, the later with the current crinkle finish) which do not sync up as well with Nikon flash units, but if flash is not a big deal for you everything else about it is identical to the current AF-D lens. The plastic barrel AF ‘non-D’ version is probably the best bargain if you can live with worn cosmetics.

Want to make your photography instantly better? Get a fast 180mm lens.

For snaps from my first serious outing with this lens, click here.