Category Archives: Nikon bodies

About Nikon DSLRs

The cardinal returns

Nikon lenses, Photographs

This time I was ready.

The bird is very shy, and wary of the rapacious quail and doves which dominate the feeder. If doves are the ornithological world’s idea of timidity then I fancy I would rather keep the company of vultures. An early attempt appears here.

The cardinal is impossible to miss. One’s peripheral vision immediately catches the flash of bright red, like an electric shock to the system.

This time I was better prepared, the 500mm Reflex Nikkor attached to the Panny GX7 set at ISO800 which delivered 1/320 second. This at the lens’s fixed f/8 aperture. While hand-held, that’s poor technique as a 1,000mm FFE optic really needs a solid support. I got lucky, aided by the critical focus option in the Panny which permits enlargement of a selected area for proper focus. Of the twenty snaps the first (go figure!) was the only one usable. I would guess that depth of field at 30 feet distant is no more than a couple of inches. The image is from the full frame. I passed the file through PS to remove the out-of-focus ‘donuts’ typical with catadioptric lenses, and often quite distracting. More on that technique appears in the link in this paragraph.

In lieu of the use of Mirror Lock Up which I advocate with a conventional DSLR to cut vibration, I use the GX7’s silent and vibration-free electronic shutter. A Panasonic MFT body is superior in every way to a conventional mirrored DSLR with this lens if you need 1,000mm FFE. You get a vibrationless electronic shutter, a very light rig which can be easily carried slung over the shoulder all day, Panny’s superior magnified focus aid and, best of all, a bright finder image as the electronics automatically adjust for the small f/8 aperture. And to get 1,000mm FFE with the full frame DSLR you have to cut out a large part of the image in processing, rendering your DSLR’s sensor effective pixel count the same as the lower spec of the MFT’s sensor.

Here are the ‘after’ and ‘before’ images:

The Reflex is a special lens, small, light with delightfully smooth focus action, but easy to use it is not. Add a small, nervous subject and you have your work cut out for you.

To learn more of the design history of Nikkor’s reflex optics under Teruyoshi Tsunashima click here.


GX7 with the adapted 500mm Reflex Nikkor. Arca-style QR plate fitted.

Nikon D850

Nikon bodies

No, you do not need one.

The Nikon D850 may well be the most capable camera yet made. A jack of all trades it comes with extraordinary sensor definition, access to a vast array of the best in lenses …. and you do not need it.

While the stress which this body will place on your lens and computer gear is immense, what with a 46mp sensor and 7fps continuous frame rate which will dictate more money for the very best lenses, the fastest CPUs and SSDs and just about everything else in the chain, the bottom line is that for – I’m guessing here – 99.9% of users the camera is total overkill. That’s because those 99.9% display their images on iPhones and tablets and small computer screens. The technology in that sensor is wasted.

If you want to read a comprehensive review the folks at DP Review do their usually excellent job. Click here.

Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics last week for his decades long work in the field of behavioral economics. Scoffed at by classical economists for years, for they argue that man is a perfectly logical decision maker in matters economic, we all intuitively know that his views are right. We are irrational beings who do not make coldly objective decisions. A YouTube video, a 62 second clip of a discussion between Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, goes a long way to debunking those classicists’ belief that money is a purely fungible commodity.

Were it not for the realities of behavioral economics, cameras like the Nikon D850 would never have been made as the professional audience which can justify the technologies therein is too small to turn a profit. It’s amateurs who need the bragging rights of 46mp and 7fps, and it’s behavioral economics which make this body a profit center for Nikon. Those amateurs have only irrational reasons for owning this body. Heck, maybe Professor Thaler will buy one with his prize money?

Two bargain classics

Canon 5D, Nikon bodies, Photographs

From the Big Two.

Now that digital bodies seem to arrive almost quarterly from the big manufacturers – and seemingly weekly from the tedious ‘instant obsolescence’ Sony which still gets very little right – it’s interesting to look back on the early days of full frame DSLRs. I was lucky to own both of the models mentioned below and would unhesitatingly buy used ones today.

My first serious DSLR was the Canon 5D and lightly used bodies now sell for under $500. Though the modest sized 12.8mp sensor is small by modern standards it’s hard to beat the color rendering and unless you need video or truly enormous prints (of course you don’t – face it, you put your stuff out on the web) the 5D cannot be beaten when it comes to price:performance today.


The outstanding original Canon 5D.


Barn. Templeton, CA. Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 Canon L.

Nearly every Canon lens is excellent and of the fixed focus ones the 35mm, 50mm and outstanding 85mm f/1.8 are recommended and very inexpensive new or used.

Nikon was slow to the FF game and its first affordable body was the D700. It came with a 12.1mp Sony sensor which was exceptional in most regards but especially when it came to low noise at higher ISOs. Those large pixels helped with that and, as with the 5D, low noise prints up to 18″ x 24″ were par for the course. $800 gets you a good one but insist on a Nikon USA model (distinguishable by the small ‘USA’ sticker on the inside of the body when the battery is pulled) because that’s the only kind Nikon USA will service in the USA. Alternatively, if you have a good aftermarket Nikon service shop available, provenance is of no consequence. There is a truly vast array of Nikon lenses from 1960 on available, MF, AF, fixed focus, zoom, you name it, any price point. The superb 50mm MF f/2 Nikkor-H can be found in mint condition all day long for $60 or less and you can take it from there.


The immensely capable Nikon D700.


Baby carrier. Nikon D700, 180mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor.

The D700 is usually reckoned to have a shutter life of 150,000 – and replacements are cheap – with lightly exercised bodies a dime a dozen. Again, as with the 5D there’s no video, and the build quality is excellent.

No one needs more than 12mp in a DSLR as no one prints any more (well, I do and 12mp is just fine; heck the iPhone6 is good for 18″ x 24″) and both these cameras’ sensors boast excellent dynamic range, low noise and outstanding color rendering.

Some architecture

Nikon lenses, Photographs

A great way to end the year.

Few things beat a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco, and the city’s propensity for preserving its old buildings means more subject matter for an itchy trigger finger.

These were all snapped today on three classic ‘metal era’ MF Nikkors from my copious inventory on the D3x – the 35mm f/2, the 85mm f/1.8 and an all time favorite, the 200mm f/4, an outstanding optic for picking out gorgeous period details.

The absence of autofocus for this type of subject matter is anything but a hindrance. If anything, the more contemplative approach required is a benefit.

Processed in LR6, some verticals straighened in PS CS5, some juice added here and there in Snapseed.

Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens

Nikon lenses

Still in production.

The most remarkable thing about the Nikon Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens is that Nikon continues to make it. It’s available new for some $650 – not cheap – and will work on just about any Nikon body, film or digital, since the groundbreaking Nikon F of the 1960s. This example belongs to a friend of the blog for whom I volunteered to create lens correction profiles for use with Lightroom or Photoshop to correct linear distortion and vignetting. As a general rule, the wider the lens the greater is the incidence of these aberrations.

My 20mm Nikkor of choice is the original and massive 20mm UD f/3.5 Nikkor which is nearly a half century old. Mint examples can be found for around $300; many are available and there is no excuse for buying a ‘beater’. It has outstanding center resolution at all apertures, with the edges catching up by f/8. You can read about it here. The current 20mm AiS is much smaller, and both lenses are manual focus only:


The old UD Nikkor is on the D2x at left.


The current 20mm AiS optic is on the D3x at right.

Where the UD adopts the early ‘all metal’ finish of the classic era, the AiS uses rubberized focus and aperture rings. Both lenses are manual focus.

Despite the high price, Nikon does not fit a CPU to the lens so the user has to manually dial in the aperture and focal length on the Nikon body if any lens profile is to be automatically recognized in LR or PS; the CPU I have fitted to the UD dispenses with this need. You can always tell LR which profile to use if you forget to dial it into the body or dial in the wrong one.

The owner of the 20mm f/2.8 AiS shown here advises that Lightroom CC (the cloud version) no longer permits profiles to be dialed in manually, but Photoshop CC does. So if you are solely a Lightroom user and need to manually input profiles, I recommend you use the stand alone Lightroom 6 desktop version, still available. Adobe really does no want you to do that, preferring to steer you to the rental model of the CC version, but follow my guide here and you can download it easily. Given that PS and LR are pretty much stalled and at the end of their development cycles, there’s little justification for buying the CC version with its purported ‘constant updates’. A disingenuous business model if ever there was one, but that’s Adobe for you.

CPU on the UD is arrowed.

Given the narrow rear flange of the AiS, installation of a CPU would be a trivial process, and I describe that here.

I created the lens profile for the AiS using Adobe Lens Profile Creator in the usual way, at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 and f/8. After f/8 nothing changes. Here is the profile invoked in the Develop module of Lightroom 6 – LR 3-5 will work just as well. The profile is placed in the User’s Library directory as explained in the above link. To ‘see’ the directory in Finder be sure to hit the ‘Option’ key when in Finder->Go as the fools at Apple have seen fit to hide it in recent releases of OS X.


Profile invoked in LR.

While the profile says ‘D3x’ in the title it is non-body specific and will work with any Nikon digital image, FX or DX (APS-C). In practice the profile does an outstanding job of correcting the fairly pronounced vignetting at wider apertures, as well as correcting the minor but very complex linear distortion which is of the ‘wave’ or ‘moustache’ type common in Nikkor 20mm lenses – both my UD and my (now sold) 20mm f/3.5 Ai lens exhibit it. The vignetting is slightly less pronounced – uncorrected – than in the old UD, but there is little in it between the two and after applying the respective profiles there is no difference in this regard.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – no profile.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – with profile.

The profile cannot correct for chromatic aberration and the AiS exhibits red fringing (the UD displays green fringing, by contrast):


Red fringing in the AiS at f/2.8.

A quick tweak in LR removes the fringing:

Here are the settings:


Removing the AiS’s red fringing in LR6.

How does the extreme corner definition compare with the UD? As my earlier UD review discloses, the UD is optimized for center sharpness at full aperture (f/3.5) so the corners suffer. Yet despite that the UD is clearly superior in the extreme corners as the image below shows. This would make a 72″ print and was taken in very overcast, low contrast conditions, a very challenging environment for any lens:


Extreme top left corner – AiS on the left, UD on the right. Both with lens profiles and color correction applied.

So maybe not all progress is forward. You get two thirds of the bulk and weight but lose corner resolution at full aperture with the newer lens. The UD maintains an advantage in corner resolution at all apertures, though the difference falls as the lenses are stopped down. While I do not publish them here, center resolution of the UD is 1 stop better than for the AiS through f/5.6, after which the two lenses are identical.

You can download the lens correction profile for the 20mm AiS Nikkor by looking for it here.

Here’s a far better illustration of how the ‘wave distortion’, seemingly common to 20mm Nikkors, is corrected. These were taken by the lens’s owner:


No profile – see how the lintel drops then rises – top right hand corner.


With profile. Red chromatic aberration remains to be corrected but the ‘wave’ is gone.