Category Archives: Photography

Pearls among swine

Photography

A friend helps out.

There are some photo sites I simply refuse to read. They generally fall under the “Anything for a click through dollar” genus and place heavy focus on technique and hardware. The photography on display is invariably execrable and brand wars and pixel peeping are the order of the day. No piece of new hardware goes un-praised and is instantly acclaimed as obsoleting all that came before it, and the grasping acceptance of all those free manufacturers’ samples is always accompanied by a click through which makes these whores money, generally unknown to the reader. The long shadow of ethical behavior is a stranger to these venues.

And while these creations of quick buck artists seem to include the occasional gem among all the detritus, it’s more than I can do to make myself search out the diamonds in the rough. But some friends are more courageous, and one forwarded me a link the other day to a simply splendid piece of photography and writing by one of America’s Space Shuttle astronauts at a site I would never otherwise visit.

Click the picture for the article and be sure to check the author’s resumé at the end. How could anyone possibly improve on this record of intellect and service?

Click the picture.

DSLRs and wifi

Photography

Lamentable.

No sooner had my used Nikon D700 arrived in February than I got to setting up the annual studio session to take our boy’s birthday picture.

As Winston is getting pretty hip to photography, aged 10, I thought it would be fun to connect up the MacBook Air to the D700 and import the RAW pictures into Lightroom so that he could immediately see the results. It proved to be a remarkably effective setup, and the near-instant feedback clearly made him a better and more involved subject. After all, the attention span of a ten year old makes most high strung supermodels look like Job himself, by comparison. These were the very first snaps I made on the D700 and you can see the results here.

But what was wrong with this technology is that I still had to run wires between the camera and the laptop.

Now my studio flash is triggered wirelessly using a $20 remote trigger.

The D700 speaks to any number of satellites using a $105 GPS data logger and Bluetooth receiver, telling me the location of a snap within three feet or so.

I can trigger the D700 wirelessly from 100 feet or more away, using a radio transmitter costing all of $23.

My iPhone (camera? free) not only records GPS coordinates but can also send the pictures automatically to iCloud, whence they can be sent to all connected iDevices or Macs.

But try to get images out of the D700 or any other ‘serious’ camera for instant preview on an iPad and you are either broke or SOL.

Broke? Here are the Nikon and Canon options for users of serious gear:

Hose job by Nikon. Can you believe how clunky this is?

Rip-off by Canon. At least it’s not clunky, but forget using your battery pack.

No matter that any number of cheaper point-and-shoots can now accomplish the task for a fraction of those silly-priced gadgets, Nikon and Canon seem determined to sell a few to pros who can justify the cost, rather than millions to enthusiasts who would gladly pay $100-200 for the opportunity of sending snaps wirelessly to their iPad.

Well, someone at Nikon has woken up and the just announced prosumer D3200 APS-C body will accept a new gadget which is actually realistically priced. By the way, you can buy 4-5 D3200s for one D800:

Nikon wifi transmitter for the D3200.

But the good news stops there. One second looking at the following picture tells you the design is awful, sticking out the side where it’s an accident waiting to happen:

Nikon’s design catastrophe. The wifi transmitter installed. Ghastly red body is, mercifully, an option.

But wait, it gets worse. 75% of all tablets sold are iPads. The other 25% are bought by someone, I suppose, but I have yet to see one in use. And that minority runs the Android OS, in half a dozen different versions. Look at what any creative person uses and it’s a dollars-to-doughnuts bet that it will be a Mac and an iPad. So what does Nikon do? Why, release the wifi transmitter in an Android version only. Don’t ask me which version of Android because the press release is silent and don’t ask which wifi protocol because they say even less about that. Knowing the brains trust at Nikon it’s probably 802-11a which went out of use a decade ago. An iOS version? “Later this year” the geniuses in Kogaku aver. Do these people ever get out of the lab?

There is always the Eye-Fi solution I suppose. Coming only in slow, limited capacity SDHC cards, these have a weak wifi transmitter built in which sends your pictures to a remote server using your home wifi, for later retrieval. A local ad hoc (hotspot) network can only be used with the premium-priced X2 Eye-Fi card – $50-130 for 4-8gB. The speed is Class 6, which means 40x, compared to the 400X of a cheaper stock card which is ten times faster. You need ad hoc wifi for when you are not on your home wifi router and just want to send the snaps to the iPad in your backpack while in the middle of the tundra. User comments at Amazon.com suggest that the device is problematic and, of course, forget using it on a D700 which only takes CF cards. Convert using a CF-SDHC adapter? Fughedaboutit. Eye-Fi specifically advises against that and good luck finding a Type I adapter which is the only kind that fits the D700 if you do want to try. Finally, Eye-Fi cards do not work with RAW files, though in fairness, with an iPad, that’s hardly an issue as you want small JPGs for preview purposes.

What is called for is that the vibrant aftermarket, the same which gave me wireless strobe triggering, GPS and a wireless remote release, designs something for $50 which works with iOS, supporting a local ad hoc wifi connection to any device in range and working with any DSLR with a video socket, which is about all of them. I would set my camera to take low quality JPG + RAW files, transmitting the JPGs to my iPad or Mac of choice during the session. Now how hard can that really be? If I can get my GPS position within 36 inches just about anywhere on the planet for $104, why not a small wifi transmitter for a like sum? Hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic pro and prosumer Canon, Nikon and Sony DSLR users would beat a path to the maker’s door. Even if it only came in pink.

Making the Reflex Nikkor sing

Nikon lenses

A superb optic, but it can use some help.

I wrote at length about the Nikon Nikkor 500mm f/8 Reflex-N lens here, illustrating the results it can produce with several images.

Since then, I have made two enhancements which substantially improve results from this tricky to use optical masterpiece.

Read about this lens on the web and you will generally find it’s damned with faint praise. I believe this is the result of faulty technique more than anything. It’s very hard to hold so long a lens steady, leading to motion blur taking the edge off definition. A monopod is a huge help here. And it’s no easier focusing the lens which has a very shallow depth of field at its fixed f/8 aperture, which hardly makes for a bright finder image. Indeed, the depth of field is identical to a mythical 50mm f0.8 lens! Meaning that focus is a binary concept – there’s no ‘close’ and getting away with it. There’s no stopping down. The f/8 aperture is your sole choice. While use of a fast shutter speed and high ISO largely took care of motion blur, helped by the excellent high ISO performance of the Nikon D700, poor focus technique was the major cause of my high rejection rate on the first outing with the lens.

CPU installed in the Nikkor Reflex lens, glued to the rear protective filter.
Manfrotto QR plate below, for quick on and off with a monopod.

The first enhancement was to install a CPU in the lens. $30 from Singapore. The rear of the lens accepts a clear Nikon filter which protrudes just enough to provide a base for glueing on a CPU, a technique I discussed here. Epoxy is de rigeur as there’s little base for the CPU to adhere to. As luck would have it, the external dimension of the filter is the perfect size for proper mating of the CPU with the contacts in the camera’s body. Thank you, Mr. Tsunashima! The CPU, as delivered in stock form, has Focus Block switched On. This means that with the ‘C’, ‘S’, ‘M’ switch on the front of the D700 switched to ‘S’, the shutter set to ‘S’ on the top left dial and Custom Function ‘a2′ set to ‘AF-S priority selection’ not to ‘Release’, (phew!) a picture can only be taken when the focus confirmation light is on. Stated differently, you compose the picture, use the joy stick pad on the rear of the camera to place the focus rectangle over the part of the image you want sharp and then, holding down the shutter release button, rotate the focus collar until …. the shutter goes off! As long as your camera’s focus confirmation light coincides with optimum focus, your focus will be right. Alternatively, if the subject is moving, the shutter will be released when the subject enters sharp focus. If the focus confirmation light is inaccurate, it can be fine tuned using the programmability of the CPU, which I also discuss in the linked article on CPU installation. Magic!

If you want to disable the Focus Block feature, simple switch the ‘C’, ‘S’, ‘M’ switch to ‘C’ and the shutter can be released regardless of focus. I explain how to fine tune the CPU for absolutely critical focus here. As regards focus confirmation, Nikon states it works down to f/5.6 but I find it’s fine on my D700 at the stated f/8 aperture. On the other hand, the light in my older D2x absolutely refuse to work with the lens, so you may want to check it on your body of choice before committing to purchase.

If you check the Lens Correction boxes when creating your import preset in Lightroom,
the profile will be automatically applied when importing images using that preset.

The second enhancement is to use a tailored lens profile when importing images to Lightroom. The other significant advantage of the CPU is that when importing images into Lightroom 3 or 4, the lens profile I created for this optic can be automatically applied, and will remove the ‘hotspotting’ the lens suffers from (a bright central halo) as well as minor pincushion distortion. You can download my lens profile for the 500mm f/8-N Nikkor Reflex lens here. It has been very carefully created and makes an already good lens great. That link also shows how to ensure that the profile is automatically recognized and applied on import, using the related import preset.

At 1/1,000th, ISO 400.

To give you some sense of the shallowness of the depth of field, in this snap the stem of the lemon is critically sharp but the front of the fruit is already out of focus when pixel peeping a 40″ print. The ‘focus until the shutter goes off’ technique was used here. You can see a couple of doughnut out-of-focus highlights up and to the right of center, typical of mirror reflex lenses. For obsessives these are a bane. For artists, an opportunity.

So next time you read about how mediocre the 500mm Reflex Nikkor is, blame the writer, not the lens.

Joe Holmes on the D800

Nikon bodies

From a real photographer.

All the talk of charts and definition and megapixels when it comes to the sensor in the Nikon D800 leaves me cold.

But when one of the finest street photographers alive writes about the new body, I pay attention. I much prefer to hear from an artist than from the manufacturer of paints and canvas.

Joe writes:

But until I print big, I don’t notice that difference. I printed an extremely detailed D800 image in the best possible quality at 17″—22″, and I might be able to see more detail. Maybe. If I squint. Of course working with triple the resolution means I can crop the hell of an image and still have excellent quality – it’s like having a longer lens, in fact. But I seldom crop. So the enormous image size will pay off eventually, but for now it doesn’t make a difference in my day-to-day shooting.

For the full review, click here, and check out Joe’s work while you are there.

Troubling times for PPs

Nikon bodies

Confirmation bias rules.

For the man in the street the idea of blowing $3,000 on a camera, without a lens mind you, is silly. For the Pixel Peeper (PP for short) it’s downright scary.

You see, the PP, who prides himself on the definition of his output when he zooms in on the screen has ‘invested’ ten to thirty times that sum in his medium format digital gear. So his expenditure naturally generates confirmation bias. It’s the most expensive gear out there so it has to be the best, right?

Then what happens is the same as happened when Canon’s 5D obsoleted medium format film gear almost overnight. Something better comes along, courtesy of Moore’s Law. The PP has a bunch of boat anchors and is looking at an upstart which equals his quality at one tenth the cost.

No great secret that I’m writing about the killer duo, here, the new Nikon D800 and D800E DSLR bodies. What makes matters even worse for the PP is that the inexpensive Nikon takes just about any Nikon lens made since 1959, finally doing many of these amazing optics justice. The sensor is at last likely better than the lens projecting the image on it.

And while no one could argue that the ‘pro’ DSLR is a lightweight, just ask a PP with his handcart and bad back how the bulk and weight of the gear compares to MF DSLRs. Not to mention speed of operation.

I’m not much of a follower of the debate raging about the latest and greatest in sensors, but I know a seismic shift when I see one and the Nikon D800 is such a shift. Were I an MF DSLR aficionado I would be following the same advice I gave myself when the Canon 5D came along. Run, don’t walk, to your favorite advertising medium and dump the MF gear just as fast as you can. Paperweights have little value.

Clap for PPs. The Nikon’s 36mp Sony-made sensor.