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To Megapixel or not to Megapixel, that is the q...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:10:10 +0000

In an earlier post of photos taken with a Fuji X100, the megapixel question came up, and as this is something I've been spending a lot of time contemplating recently, I thought maybe a discussion thread was worth opening up on the subject, principally concerning the D800 and alternative approaches, or indeed needs.

As some might know, owing to the improbably large files I've been generating over the past few years with multi-row stitched and focus-stacked panoramas, at the end of last year I bought a latest upspec PC, (12 cores @ 4.3GHz through 64GB RAM & SSD) which just, and I emphasize just, made working these panos taken with a D3s (i.e. 12MP files) practical. The biggest pano involved 240ºx160º field of view and comprised some 625 individual photographs, some focus stacked with up to 11 steps. It was the image that prodded me into upgrading the computer, because processing on my previous 8-core 2.66 GHz 12GB RAM machine had been impossibly slow.

But the D3s has some drawbacks: it is heavy to carry, and on the Nodal Ninja Ultimate panoramic head it is imperative to use the mirror up function with at least a slow 2-count pause before releasing the shutter. There is no room in one of these sequences for even one vibration-affected frame. In a photo with moving objects and less than still air, the slowness of operation thus caused can become a real problem (this shot took 29 minutes to take, moving as quickly as I could).

Of course with a slow taking sequence things like a sunrise (or sunset) become something that must be planned and prejudged exactly to even work, as the earth's rotation cannot be put on pause. I think there were close to 300 shots in this sunrise, and that it worked at all still leaves me slack-jawed (took about 12 minutes to expose moving top left to bottom right, along with a three hour return hike the evening before to work everything out so the pre-dawn setup wouldn't be guesswork):

Now enter Nikon's release of the D800E. On the face of it the extra resolution & modified anti-alias filtering was oh-so appealing (though I'm not sure why, as the human eye doesn't have a 100% function), along with the draw card of its 14+ stop dynamic range. I was on the cusp of ordering one, but delayed to allow production to bed in, and this delay let the misgivings I had filed into the "do not think about" basket bubble to the surface. My supplier's attempt to interest me in a wide-angle attachment for my Fuji X100 led me on to investigate the new Fuji Pro X1, sweetened by Fuji's promise of a Leica M mount adapter, along with a plethora of 3rd party adapters for umpteen other lens mounts.

So I took more interest in my X100 and tried to envision how a mirrorless rangefinder camera with a hybrid viewfinder might fit into the scheme of my "serious" photographic work.

Yesterday I set up the X100 on the Nodal Ninja pano head in the backyard and did a really rough 360º spherical set of exposures (74 all-up). Focus stacking is not an option with this camera given that any "manual" focusing involves turning a focusing ring which in turn has the AF motor moving the lens, which is jerky and after-thought style stupid. However a manual focus legacy lens will not have this drawback on a Pro X1.

Getting to the point of all this now was that taking the pano was simply lightning fast compared with the mirror-up~...wait~....release of the D3s. Triggered with a good old-fashioned screw-in type cable release, the only problem was not vibration (zero) but rather knowing that the camera had taken the exposure at all, the shutter being so quiet. The X1 will be louder, and this is not a bad thing in this instance. Or alternatively the sonic fake shutter sound could be set in the menu, of course. All 74 shots were completed in 5 minutes flat, including a couple of pregnant pauses where I wondered whether the shutter had gone off at all, and also fiddling with the pano head to adjust for the vertical rows. The desire for the D800E was teetering...

So to image assembly - the X100 takes 12.2MP size files. The computer had no problem with this, but the end file size was still a tad over 2GB. So the 16MP Pro X1 using a similar focal length will have one of these spherical panos using a 23mm lens in at around 2.75GB, and for a D800E we're looking at around 6.6GB by simple multiplication - but probably not all that much larger if a 23mm lens was used as the sensor covers more real estate with each shot. However this is getting ridiculous for something to be printed out at a maximum of 24" high @ 288ppi, or worse, made into a quicktime pano tour web-size movie of around 1MB. Even a 44" high print would probably be over-serviced. Have you ever tried to sell a 44"x 8' print? Very small market for this. Tiny, even. As small as the print is large.

If I were trying to enlarge a single frame to 34"x24" perhaps the D800E would make sense, but fact is that I rarely do this, and even when I have the D3s files have posed no real problems getting there. Sure, they might not hold up as well under inspection-glass scrutiny, but at a viewing distance of a couple of feet or more, no problems whatsoever. Even though using the same focal length might result in fewer photos needed overall with the D800E, if focus stacking each shot was part of the equation there would be the need to process these full-size D800E files, so a stack of 12 would involve churning around roughly 2.4GB of info in the form of Tiff files. A pano involving stacks from 1" to infinity would be a nightmare, but this is something I'm working on at the moment. Even though there'll be more individual stacks involved, the ~100MB Tiffs from a 16MP camera will be a lot more machine friendly than doing this with 36MP files. Same goes for HDR stacks.

The backyard shot below started out at 27771 pixels wide, hammered down to 1389px if expanded by clicking on the forum thumbnail further hammered down to that shown here, so forget about judging image detail & sharpness, just take my word that both are here in spades on the original (the DR is, however, very evident, and yes, I'll paint the shed one day, after I repaint the roof and everything else that a 132 year old house needs in ongoing maintenance ):

I had made a lo-res *.mov "tour" file of this but the website refused to upload it (format incompatible?) so the smudge bottom & top won't make sense, but the tripod is what's stretched along the bottom, and I didn't bother with either "nodal" shots to cover the tripod over or the zenith circle either.

Edit: I'll also add this 100% section (click on it to see at it's 1000px width) to back what I said about resolution and to give perhaps a better idea of just how big this image is at its native resolution, the dam & post gives the position of this away with regard to the rest of the picture (remember, this is from a 12.2MP camera):

Now the Pro X1 has allegedly got the best sensor ever seen in an APS-C format, and given the way that the X100 handled this rough & ready 360º shot covering deep shadow to straight into the sun (no planning at all, only the most cursory exposure reading & setting), I'd have no fear that the Pro X1 will be more than capable of even better. So I'll probably order one next week.

Also the 23mm lens on the X100 is too wide for panos with minimal distortion (crop factors are meaningless here outside of the number of shots required, 23mm is 23mm which causes almost unacceptable anamorphic distortion in panos - or horizontal compression, to put it another way) - 35mm is my preferred focal length as a balance between anamorphic distortion and sheer numbers of photos required to cover the real estate, and thus also the end file size. So in fact we're talking even bigger unsampled end file sizes anyway... the first photograph at the top was taken with a 50mm lens to completely wipe out anamorphic distortion, which helps account for the huge number of shots required (aside from the stacking involved). Of course the smaller APS-C sensor on the Pro X1 will require even more shots to cover the same real estate were I to use a 50mm lens, and were I to contemplate a 4/3rds camera, even moreso again.

So assuming a 35mm lens will be the best compromise, I have a 35/1.4 AI-s which I bought brand new at end 2010 and will fit a Pro X1 via adapter, and I possibly will nevertheless also contemplate the Fuji's "standard" 35/1.4 as well for those AF-type shots away from the pano head. Whatever, the D800E would appear to be off my shopping list now as being less practical for this sort of thing.

Swings and roundabouts, nothing's ever simple, is it?

Link to discussion

Review: Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:39:38 +0000

Introduction

Back at the beginning of this century when I became interested in photography, one of the first specialist lenses I bought was the original Sigma 105mm 2.8 EX Macro. I got it because at the time I had been pre-conditioned into believing that anything with a 2.8 maximum aperture was going to be "da bomb" for any pictures I took with it. This one had been purchased off an auction site and it was my intention to use it for portraiture.

The lens was very sharp, but it was a specialist lens that required a great deal of user knowledge in order to obtain the maximum output. For a start it was extremely slow to focus and it grew longer than Pinocchio’s nose the closer you focused it. I actually did my first paid product shoot with that lens in my bedroom when I was still tied into the Matrix (which is Dallas speak for “corporate rat race”). The shots were made with my F5 on Velvia 50 slide film and were super saturated. Boy, was I green when it came to choosing the right tools for the job back then. I had the right lens and camera, but Velvia 50 for products?

Fast-forward more than a decade to today and while things have certainly changed in the imaging world, product photography is still a big part of my life and I can at least boast that I have progressed to a point where I am able to convince some people that they should pay me to take pictures of their products. The lenses I am using have progressed too and the one I am reviewing for you here is the re-incarnation of that same Sigma 105mm 2.8 Macro I used to do my first ever product shoot, but this time with a little added refinement.

Application

Why use a macro lens? What is the point in them? Optically they are designed to let you get closer and produce magnification that is at least 1:1 with real life in your camera’s sensor, or in some cases even closer (with accessories). This one does 1:1 on it’s own and let’s you work as close as 31.2cm from your subject.

I use macro lenses for my product photography because of this ability to work closer. Sometimes it’s a blessing and other times it’s a curse, because filling a frame with a small object, while possible on shorter focal length macro lenses, can change the perspective of the object you’re trying to shoot. I shoot a lot of books for one of my clients and I have found that with a 60mm macro lens I tend to use only half the frame because if I get any closer the book begins to look like a looming giant. This is why I began looking for a lens that would allow me to work a little bit further away, but still retain some sense of normalcy in perspective, all the while filling the FX frame with the product I am shooting.

I don’t shoot any flowers or insects, nor have I ever done any focus stacking, so please bear this in mind when reading this review. I’m reviewing the lens based on my typical applications, which are product shots, some close ups of stuff, and very occasionally a portrait or two.

The new Sigma 105mm 2.8 EX HSM has evolved from my first Sigma 105mm 2.8 macro lens dramatically. It’s a completely new lens.

We now have a lens that has super quick focusing, thanks to the built-in Hyper-sonic motor (HSM); has internally shifting elements, meaning that the lens doesn’t get longer, or have a rotating front element when it focuses closer; plus, the biggest change of all, it now has an optical stabiliser built in.

On paper it seems to be the perfect lens for what I do, so let’s find out if it is.

Aesthetics and handling

The Looks
The first 105mm Sigma macro lens I had was finished in that horrible metallic paint that would always peel off and leave the lens looking like something straight out of a war movie. This new one is made of the same polycarbonate material that my sigma 70-200mm 2.8 OS is made from. It’s lightweight but it does seem a bit plasticky to the touch. Because of its smoothness it also tends to pick up fingerprints quite easily, which shouldn’t be a consideration in making a lens choice, but I thought I would point it out nonetheless.

I can’t help but think that this lens was modelled on the shape of a can of beer. Take off the lens hood and it has very similar dimensions! Don’t leave it on the table if you’re on a Nikongear workshop where Erik Lund is present because he’ll saw off the bottom, take out the gizzards and likely call it an improvement on the original!

Speaking of lens hoods, you can expect the usual Sigma two-part hood in the box, which you bayonet together depending on whether you are shooting FX or DX format cameras. I don’t know if this actually makes a difference - I don’t have a DX format camera to test it out on. Also there is a soft nylon clad padded case for it. In short it is a pretty nicely made lens.

Focusing
The focusing ring is fairly close to the front end of the lens but in my opinion this is the perfect place to put it, because when you’re holding the camera properly (ie, with your left hand cradling the lens from underneath), it’s a short movement of forefinger and thumb to reach the focus ring, instead of having to hold the lens closer to the camera body if you are focusing manually.

The focus throw is pretty short when you’re doing this manually. I don’t have a protractor to measure it with, but a movement of only a few degrees (or notches on the rubber ring) when I am at the minimum focusing distance shifts the focus depth by more than 10 centimeters. This could be critical if you are engaged in focus stacking something like jewellery and only want to shift focus very slightly. You’re going to need a skillful touch to get that right unless of course you have the luxury of a focusing stage for your work.

Like most modern lens designs, the new Sigma 105mm Macro allows you to manually over-ride the autofocus without fighting against the HSM motor. I personally never do this, but many other photographers do.

The auto-focus speed is very decent on a D700. Nikon forgot to send me copies of the D4 and D800’s so I can’t comment on how this would work on those cameras, but as a man who is committed to his short-term photographic future with the D700, I have to say that this lens has great auto focus ability on that camera. I tested it out in very dim light using both the center and extreme focus points of the D700 and with even the slightest bit of detectible contrast the lens snapped into focus faster than I can say “where the ---- are you?”

Sigma advertise that the lens is compatible with their EX range of tele-converters. I have both the 1.4x and 2.0x converters on loan from them to test with the new 120-300mm 2.8 OS so I gave them a whirl on the 105mm too. Under the same conditions as using the lens bare, with the 1.4x tele-converter there is no perceptible degradation in the auto-focus speed as far as I can tell. It’s still pretty darn fast. The 2x tele-converter is a different story: no auto-focus at all. You have to focus manually, which given the short focus throw already mentioned leaves you with limited applications for that combo. On the plus side the optical stabiliser still works with both these TC’s.

Image Quality

Macro lenses need to be sharp and they need to have the ability to make the subject literally “pop” from the background, which itself is hopefully rendered with creamy smooth bokeh.

Those are the most commonly desired characteristics in any lens, but in my case (where I am shooting product) I also need the lens to be sharp at minimum aperture with as little chromatic aberrations on the edges of shiny items as possible. You also don’t want the lens to give you any unnatural colour casts, particularly when you are shooting product, as this will make your post processing just that little bit more tiresome.

So, it’s those optical characteristics I set out to discover the virtues of for the purposes of this review.

Sharpness
Let’s begin with the most desirable characteristic of any lens. Is it sharp? Yes. I found that it is definitely sharp, to the point where I wouldn’t have any problems photographing product with it. I also have the Tamron 90mm 2.5, Nikon 60mm 2.8 and Nikon 105mm 2.8 VR macro lenses and short of trying to measure the actual sharpness of this Sigma compared to those others, what I can say is that I found it a bit sharper than the Tamron wide open, but not as sharp as the Nikons are wide open. When stopped down to values between f/8 and f/22 there’s nothing in it. They’re all as sharp as you could hope them to be and it’s these stopped down apertures where you will find yourself in macro work most of the time. Box ticked.

This is the kind of work I would be using this lens for

100% crop (Nikon D700)

Bokeh
Nearly every macro lens is optically engineered to give you the kind of defocused background that you need to separate your subject from distractions like chain link fences, or big bushes full of leaves with sunlight sprinkled on them.

The bokeh refers to the characteristics of how the out of focus highlights are rendered in your photograph. The softer circular highlights are the better the bokeh. Modern lenses mostly deploy curved aperture iris blades to improve this mystical quality of the optics and the Sigma also ticks this box. Out of focus highlights are acceptable to me.

This was photographed at fairly close range @f/3.5 with a palm in the background about 1.5m away

And here's the same set-up shot at f/8

Chromatic Abberations
If there are any, I’m not seeing them clearly enough for it to be an issue and I shot this lens at all apertures and under a variety of different situations. Box ticked.

Image Stabiliser
It works as it is intended to and I found myself being in the familiar position of being able to use the lens hand held at fairly slow exposures. However, the OS on this lens seems to be very noisy. It makes a loud, indescribable noise on engagement as well as when it stops. I found it quite unsettling and am not sure if it is like this on all copies, or just this test one.

There are two modes for the OS; position 1 is for normal shooting and position 2 is for shooting objects that are moving horizontally to the camera. The lens information brochure advises that one should switch off the OS when you are attaching the lens to your camera. I always switch off my camera when I am changing lenses, so I guess that doesn’t really make a difference to me.

Compared to the Nikkor:

It’s going to be obvious to anybody that the alternative to this lens is the Nikon 105mm 2.8G VR, which I own. As I mentioned, I found the Nikon fractionally sharper at wider apertures than the Sigma, but to be honest, I really had to study the images long and hard to make that conclusion and the difference is so minor that it probably comes down to something like effective aperture at close distance, more than optical formula.

The Nikkor is shorter and fatter and has a much bigger lens hood than the Sigma, so looks wise it is a bit different. The handling on this count will also come down to personal preference.

One area that I did comparisons between the two lenses thoroughly was the autofocus. I found that the Sigma seems to be slightly quieter than the Nikkor, but when it travels the full length of the focus range it is somewhat slower end-to-end (probably because its optics literally have farther distance to cover).

An advantage it has over the Nikkor on AF is that it offers three distance settings for focus limitation. You can set it to cover the full focus range, 0.45m - infinity, or 0.312m to 0.45m. The Nikkor only offers full range and 0.5m to infinity.

Overall Opinion & Conclusion

Sigma is constantly evolving with their product offering and it’s great to see them giving photographers more options. This lens is like many of those you will find in their EX (pro) range. It’s solidly made, optically excellent and in my opinion you can’t go wrong with this one if you are looking for a good lens for macro purposes.

The deciding factor between this lens and that of Nikon’s own 105mm VR for Nikon shooters is probably going to come down to personal preference, because price-wise there isn’t a whole lot of difference between them. The Sigma sells for $769 on both Amazon.com and B&H, whereas the Nikon sells for between $899 and $999 at those same outlets. So if you approach this option logically, the $130 savings that can be had on the Sigma will give you enough to add the 50mm f/1.8D Nikkor to your basket, or a nice new camera bag, or dinner for your SO, or … [fill in your own $130 value].

If you're the kind of photographer who likes to shoot close-ups, or even perhaps extremely sharp portraits on FX frames, I would wholeheartedly suggest looking at this option. It's a great lens. While I still have the sample lens with me I will be adding more sample images to the dedicated sample image gallery for it. If you have images of your own to add to the gallery, please use the link below to get them up there.

Reviewed by Dallas Dahms, founder and owner of Nikongear.com

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Sample image gallery

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300mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S Nikkor

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:21:43 +0000

Editor's Note: this is an old review re-published from Bjørn's website.

I had eagerly awaited my review sample of the AFS 300 mm f/4 ED-IF Nikkor for some time now. This lens would replace the old AF version with its outdated AF system, and give Nikon users an "economy" alternative to the professional AFS long-focal Nikkors. However, during lens testing I encountered problems with this new lens that should not go unnoticed for others.

Basically, the AFS 300 mm f/4 Nikkor is a well-built, fairly compact medium telephoto design and nice workmanship, although by necessity it is somewhat fatter along the waist than its AF predecessor. However, filter thread size is slimmed from 82 mm to 77 mm to conform with most of the newer "pro" Nikkors. The lens shade is telescoping but can - at last - be screwed into a locked position (same principle as the 400 mm f/3.5 Nikkor). The focusing collar is moved further back to allow easy manual focusing, something that was nearly impossible on the AF 300/4. There is an M/A switch similar to that of other AFS lenses allowing easy and precise manual tuning of focus at any time, even when the lens is driven by the AFS system to a sharply focused setting. So far, so good.

Most people would, sometimes or even permanently, deploy their 300 mm lenses on tripods. So would I. However, the tripod collar on the AFS 300 mm f/4 is a textbook example of bad design. Probably in order to save a few yen, the designers opted for a very narrow collar, which rides on a soft dampening material. The tripod mount extends from the collar in a cantilevered fashion and is outrageously thin, and flexes easily. I had serious thoughts about the usefulness of this tripod attachment. Subsequent test shooting proved me, unfortunately, more than correct in my suspicion.

For the images shown here, both lenses were set to f/5.6 and exposures were identical at 1/15 sec. I used Provia 100 F in my Nikon F5 for the test shooting of brick walls (I must have at least a national record in brick wall photography) and all frames for both lenses were adjacent on the test roll. I examined and scored the processed film using my standard set-up with a Nikon stereo microscope at 40X magnification and halogen fibre-optical lighting. For illustrative purposes, I just publish two shots which show what the fuss is all about. The frames are scanned at 2700 dpi (16X oversampling) in a Nikon LS-2000 film scanner, with no exposure adjustment so the frames and details therein can be directly compared.

Entire frame: MF 300 mm f/2.8 Nikkor (At f/5.6)

Entire frame: AFS 300 mmf/4 Nikkor (At f/5.6)

There is a small difference in colour rendition between these 300 mm lenses, with the older MF lens being slighly warmer, and the AFS 300 having subtly higher colour saturation. The difference is visible in side-by-side test shots, clearly indicated here, but I sincerely doubt the practical significance of this.

The details below represent an area of 3 by 4 mm in the centre of the test images. The images speak for themselves. While the image obtained with the MF 300 lens displays all the crispness and sharpness you would expect from a professional lens - even individual sand grains in the brick mortar are clearly visible, the AFS Nikkor turned in a disastrous result. No more and no less. Upon scrutinising this image, you can easily see tell-tale signs of vibrational movement. There is a blurred streaking slanted to the left showing the whole set-up did shake violently while the frame was exposed. In fact, the viewfinder image with the AFS 300 mounted had that "swimming" quality about it that I personally associate with the cheapest of cheap tripods.

MF Nikkor 300 mm f/2.8 @ f/5.6, 1/15 sec.
Impeccable image clarity and crisp details.

AFS Nikkor 300 mm f/4 @ f/5.6, 1/15 sec.
The less said the better ... Note clear streaking in the blur pattern, caused by motion blur.

Now, it could possibly be claimed that my set-up wasn't fair and biased in the disfavour of the AFS Nikkor lens, firstly because a heavy professional camera (F5, made even heavier with its attached "L" bracket) was employed. Secondly, I used a very light and extremely rigid tripod, my Sachtler S-14 (now designated DA-75) equipped with the substantial Foba Studioball head. Since this set-up is slightly less expensive (in Norway, at least) than the 300 Nikkor, it might be argued it was of insufficient quality to keep the lens and F5 steady. However, as evidenced by the concurrently taken test shots with the MF 300 Nikkor, the Sachtler tripod enabled that very lens to deliver images of the highest quality calibre, so why not with the AFS 300?

Admittedly, test exposures ranged from 1/60 to 1/2 sec and thus were squarely within the "danger" zone for camera-induced vibrations. However, why should this only be a problem with the AFS 300, and not apply to all other tested lenses? The answer is quite simply that none of the other lenses had this poorly designed tripod collar, and thus mounted securely on my tripod. Just take a look at the tripod collars of, say, a manual 300 or 400 mm Nikkor, and feel their massive solidity. These tripod collars do their task perfectly.

In fact, I have shot test sequences with all of my long Nikkors on this very Sachtler tripod, and they include the 300 mm f/4 and f/4.5 Nikkors which never gave any problems at all. Coming to think of it, this would be the first jarred pictures caused by a poor tripod collar amongst the more than 100.000 shots taken on my Sachtler tripods.

For some later test shots done with the D1, and using a heavy-duty Sachtler fluid-head on my tripod, much sharper images were obtained with the 300 AFS. Of course, at shutter speeds faster than 1/125 sec with a tripod-mounted lens you would expect sharp results and the AFS lens delivered the goods, this time. I was able to confirm the lack of colour fringing in these images, so essentially proving the potential high quality of the optics of the AFS 300 lens. What a pity this quality is so well hidden....

The really sad thing about the whole affair is that the forthcoming AF-VR 80-400 Nikkor has an identically designed tripod collar. Good grief. I won't say more - some people never learn, but possibly the VR technology needs a vibration-prone lens to work its magic? Time will tell.

Added note: Since this review first was published, I've been deluged with mails claiming I didn't perform the tests correctly, thus the end result should be blamed on me, my poor tripod and my inadequate testing set-up. In response to this I can only repeat that no other lens tested under similar conditions did produce such bad results. Draw your own conclusions.

And by the way, I now have received independent owner's statements to the effect that their experiences with the AFS 300/4 confirm my findings. This lens indeed is extremely prone to unsteadiness when mounted on a tripod, of any kind in fact.

Recently, I learnt from a review published on a not-so-critical website that the gripe about poor tripod support was BULL (literal quotation), and that sharp images were obtained at 2 second exposures. That statement doesn't prove a thing because all vibrations would dissipate at such long exposures anyway. Please note my observations refer to using exposures in the difficult range 1/2 to 1/60 sec.

Note 1 (6 Dec, 2000): I just learned today that Nikon has made an update of the tripod collar. The external look is quite similar, but the collar and in particular the cantilevered portion now make a much more solid impression, and the flexing is nearly vanished. Seems they have enforced a critical segment just below the locking screw, plus added a thicker and tighter inner felt clothing to the ring riding on the lens barrel. I examined several samples of this 300 and the 80-400 VR as well, and all had the new and improved collar. I will in due time re-test the AFS 300/4 to convince myself that Nikon finally got their act together.

Note 2 (15 Dec, 2000): Today I had opportunity of examining the two collars side by side. I did this on two 80-400 VR Nikkors with sn. 2025xx (old) and 2034xx (new), respectively. Externally they look virtually identical. However, when you rap them with the knuckles, the old version has a resonating "brittle" sound to it, whilst the new version sounds "dull". There are subtle differences in the cast too and they fit the lens barrel differently, the newer version being a much tighter fit. Presumably the material in the casting has been changed and this has lead to the increased rigidity of the collar. However, I still think the design basically is flawed and should be replaced by a much better collar. The optics deserve it and so do the buyers.

Note (20 January, 2001): Lots of people complain to me about the problems with AFS 300/4 - as if I should be held responsible for this predicament? However, I for one am always looking for solutions to any problem - be it small or big - so here are two alternatives that in fact work.

This is no joke: it works!

The perfect solution for asthmatic photographers (I'm one of them). Use an asthma inhaling canister in its plastic casing, and wedge it firmly into position as shown above. This is guaranteed to stabilise the lens perfectly, and you have your medication freely available, too. Total cost should be $0.

For the gadget-conscious photographer, there is a handy rubber-grip thingy from Manfrotto/Bogen which also works quite well. This item is intended for use on a monopod and costs less than $10.

300mm f/2.8G AF-S VR Nikkor

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:03:25 +0000

Editor's Note: this is an old review republished from Bjørn's website.

A misty autumn morning, I received a request from Nikon Svenska AB (the Nikon facility of my neighbouring country, Sweden) to evaluate the still scarce new 300 mm Nikkor lens. I agreed provided they supplied a review sample and didn't mind my writing up whichever conclusion I drew after testing. So, next day I had the lens delivered at my doorstep as it were, and kept shooting with it for some time afterwards.

I'm always been in favour of 300 mm lenses for my kind of photography. This focal length offers a great compromise between lens quality, speed, handling, size, and isolating power. By the way, I won't factor in affordability or weight in the equation because fast telephoto lenses never come cheap, nor are they light-weight. In their 300 mm line, Nikon has offered a long series of f/2.8 and f/4-f/4.5 models over the last decades, and even an f/2 which is guaranteed to make you develop severe back pain, if you and your wallet survive the purchase. I own more of these 300 mm lenses than I like to think about, and selecting the appropriate one hasn't become easier with this VR newcomer.

The AFS 300 mm f/2.8 VR is approximately the size of the old warhorse, AFS 300/2.8, so adding VR capacity hasn't increased bulk or weight at all. Apart from the more aggressive looking control panel bristing with sliders and buttons, they look quite similar. The VR has a slick-looking lens shade made of carbon fibre probably costing a small fortune on its own. Come to think of it, the 300 VR is just like a bigger brother to my favourite 200/2 VR Nikkor. So I have to repeat a number of observations made for the latter lens.

The lens bristles with an array of controls for VR activity (on/off, normal or active mode), locking focus, commencing AF focusing, memory set, memory recall, sound signals on or off, focusing ranges and so on. Even a Hi-Fi freak would feel at home here. In my narrow-minded opinion, darkened by an aversion against Oriental VCR recorders and their equally incomprehensive user manuals, the controls just detract from normal operation of the lens. Murphy’s Law assures the control switch will be in a wrong position the critical moment you need any of these features. However, I admit the designers likely considered more broad-minded users than me when they implemented the impressive array of control features found on the VR lens. Sports photographers, for example, should have tons of possibilities to set up the lens the exact way they need. Since the 300 VR was loaned to me, I could not follow up the practice from my 200 VR and glue controls into their preferred position.

The AFS 300 Nikkor, like the 200 VR, comes with a big soft-pouch bag holding the lens with a reversed hood and a camera. I confess I rather like the trunk cases which used to be delivered with those big glass lenses in earlier days, so I'd try to get rid of the pouch as soon as possible. It makes a really nice holiday or hiking backpack for the young ones in your famility.

The AFS speed of this lens is very fast and focusing is reliable thanks to the bright view it offers through the viewfinder. Manual operation of the lens is easy thanks to the generously sized focusing collar and its smooth movement. With all its electronic gimmickery and AFS motor, it's no wonder that the VR lens will exert a considerable drain on the camera's battery. I would estimate that my D2H lost about 40% of its total power due to the use of the VR lens, so keep a spare battery at hand for any important assignment involving this gear.

The tripod collars of modern long Nikkors have been a very mixed blessing. The one of the 300 VR lens looks as were it among the better designed, however reality bites to show this impression is false. In fact, I had real problems getting adequately sharp images when the lens was atop one of my big, professional Sachtler tripods (either ENG-2HD or ENG-2 CF which have a load rating 10 to 30 times that of the 300 VR lens). And yes, I did follow those "long-lens techniques" so highly recommended, but to no avail. The lens simply isn't stable on a good tripod and shooting at 1/60 or lower means a disturbingly high incidence of blurred images. This is an appalling performance. Not as bad as my experiences with the AFS 300/4 Nikkor, but they come close.

Image sharpness

In optical terms this AFS-VR lens has basically the same complexity as its non-VR predecessor, using 11 elements in 8 groups, with 3 ED elements thrown in for good measure. The lens protector in front, which used to be an optical flat on earlier Nikon telephoto lenses, now actually is glass having a negative (meniscus) power, so perhaps should be included in the design as well, bringing the total to 12 elements. The lens coating uses sophisticated "Nano-Crystal" technology, and this works to keep lens flare under strict control for such a fast lens. Ghosting is markedly less troublesome with the new coating, too.

The AFS 300 mm f/2.8 VR, in common with the 200/2 VR, delivers very sharp images, possibly sharper images than can be resolved by the current line of Nikon DSLRs. Simple as that. I no longer test lenses using film so cannot say whether the same behaviour should occur there, but nothing indicates otherwise since performance of 35 mm film is long surpassed by the best digital systems.

Set wide open, the 300 VR delivers bitingly sharp images with just a minute trace of softness and veiling flare, and stopped down one or two stops more it delivers even sharper images with higher contrast as well. From near f/16 to the minimum at f/22, diffraction effects gradually soften the image and lower the contrast, but as this only can be perceived by direct comparison to the performance further up the aperture scale, the lens convinces even at these small aperture settings. All all apertures the image has a perfectly flat field across the entire frame and if there is a light fall-off towards the corners at the wide apertures, I probably would have to use sophisticated lab measuring gear to detect this.

I shot side-by-side comparisons between the new 300 VR and my old workhorse, AFS 300/2.8 Nikkor (Mk.I), and the new lens delivers equal or better performance at all apertures.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, superb optical performance is a nice feature, but it won't bring home the bacon on its own. So, in the end the salient point is what you can achieve with such a lens, and for me, other aspects than sheer image clarity are paramount. I tend to draw heavily on the isolating power of long lenses, using them to rearrange the "planes" of my subjects in order to gain visual clarity and enhanced impact. Some typical examples of images taken with the 300 VR are shown below.

Dancing In The Wind
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN

Autumn Maple
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN

The optical performance of the 300 VR was very well maintained when I shot a test series using it in combination with the TC-14E MkII teleconverter. In general, my attitude towards tele-converters has been luke warm at best. However, I'm pleased to report that image quality of the 300 plus TC-14E combination hold up surprisingly well. Using the 300 VR with TC-17E, I also got rather nice shots but you do need to stop down at least one stop to get good image quality.

Vibration reduction (VR)

Is vibration reduction (VR) technology really the panacea to say good-bye to all unsharp images? Well, yes and no, presumably depending on your needs and ways of shooting. The technology undoubtedly may work miracles and I even managed to get a critically sharp shot at 1/15 sec hand-held, and as long as 1/8 sec with some additional support. For my notoriously shaky hands this is just phenomenal. The master VR control is located on a rotating ring to the rear of the lens. This method works much better than on some other VR lenses because you can operate it by touch, there is no need to remove your eye from the viewfinder to locate the switch. I tend to select VR "Normal" mode for most of my VR-assisted shooting. The image in the viewfinder does meander a bit, but since it moves slowly, I didn't notice the feeling of seasickness I've experienced with the 70-200 VR zoom. With VR set to "Active" mode, the finder jumps more haphazardly around, but still no problem as this mode suits shooting from boats or moving vehicles, shooting circumstances than I personally can do without and accordingly try to avoid, thus killing at least two birds with one stone.

A pertinent question always lingering on my mind is whether VR influences image quality. In order to come to grips with possible ill effects of VR, I have done extensive test shooting with the 300 VR lens mounted on a high-quality, professional calibre tripod (Sachtler ENG 2 HD with the Burzynski "Protech" tripod head). For all shots, I allowed VR to run for about 1 minute to ensure it had all the vibration data it possibly could crave for, before I tripped the shutter using a cable release.

As I already found out for other VR lenses from Nikon (AFS 70-200/2.8 VR and AFS 200/2 VR Nikkors), the AFS 300 doesn't like the combination of tripod mounting and VR operation. When shutter speeds become progressively longer, the chance is that you will obtain a blurred image with VR turned on. This results because VR misinterprets the minute vibration residual found in a setup in which the lens is deployed on a high-quality tripod, and thus starts to counteract a non-significant vibration by adding its own internal lens movements. You would expect the AFS 300 VR to improve its VR behaviour on a tripod, thanks to its shake-prone tripod mount, but even this "hope" died in vain.

So, what is Nikon’s take on such issues. Officially, the brochure accompanying the lens claims there is no need to switch VR off for tripod use. We know by now this simply isn’t true. However, Nikon partially admits this statement isn’t entirely correct by adding a vague phrase about "unlocked tripod heads". Having a firmly locked tripod head ensures you will get the exact framing of the image which you may need, so unlocking the head just to allow VR to function better is not the optimal solution for many shooting occasions. You’ll be better served by moving the VR slider to the OFF position. On the other hand, if you have a lesser quality tripod, shoot fast-moving subjects, plan to do panning shots at slow shutter speeds, or simply need the tripod to ease the weight of the lens off your back, then VR might continue to be a welcome functionality and the lack of a clamped-down tripod head might not be entirely critical. You do have to know that VR can be a mixed blessing to fully appreciate its bright side and to avoid the darker side of its sophisticated technology.

Bokeh

You would expect a long, fast lens to render the background pleasantly unsharp. Set wide open this also can be observed for all f/2.8-class long Nikkors. But when the lens is stopped down, huge differences exist between various telephoto lenses as far as bokeh is concerned.

The bokeh of the AFS 300 is phenomenal in terms of its endearing creamy softness. Further to its advantage is the way the lens behaves when it is stopped down. The AFS/non-VR predecessor exhibited quite nasty out-of-focus rendition when set to f/5.6 or smaller, whils the VR lens continues to be well behaved in an exemplary manner. In fact, even at f/22 its nicely rounded, softish bokeh prevails. It must rank amongst the most pleasant lenses ever made in terms of its bokeh.

Pixe Wonderland (Series)
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN
The nice rendition of the out-of-focus area is simply stunning. The creaminess of the 300 lens matches that of the AFS 200/2 VR and AFD 85/1.4 Nikkors, the best in the entire Nikkor line-up.

The Summing Up

In terms of optical quality, the VR version of the old classic f/2.8 telephoto is the best yet. Colour saturation and image contrast are great, details are rendered with tremendous clarity, and the superb bokeh probably would endear the VR model to many people, including yours truly. I have to admit that going back to my old, AFS 300 mm f/2.8 Mk.I and having to put up with its questionable bokeh when that lens is stopped down, wasn't easy. But I resent the idea of having to purchase yet another 300mm lens, and besides, for my line of work the new 300 VR wouldn't be perfect. Downsides - once again - poor VR performance when the lens is mounted on a tripod, and a not acceptable tripod collar arrangement. You have to decide whether or not these drawbacks are show-stoppers for your personal shooting assignments. If you shoot from a monopod or can have sufficiently short shutter speeds, the tripod-mounted inadequacies may not be noticed at all. I expect a huge number of sports photographers will take to this lens as ducks take to water, thus the 300/2.8 VR likely will be the reference medium-length Nikkor from now on. Exeunt the old workhorse, enter the new King.

Visit the resource page for this lens

200mm f/2G ED-IF VR Nikkor

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:42:44 +0000

Editorial note: this is a republished review from Bjørn's website.

In a truly inscrutable and Oriental way, Nikon engineers took a number of people by surprise when the AFS 200 mm VR Nikkor was launched. The old 200/2 Nikkor had been one of the least known of the long Nikkors of its time. I belonged to the surprised lot, and since 200/2 always had been one of my favourite optical weapons, I grabbed the very first of these lenses arriving to Norway.

Autumn Flowers
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN
Image sharpness and endearing softness are features all coming nicely together with the new AFS 200 mm f/2 VR Nikkor lens mounted on my D1X camera

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of the great lenses of yesterday. They were built to last with a workmanship rarely if ever seen in today's products. The new AFS 200 mm f/2 G ED-IF VR Nikkor (phew – what a convoluted mess Nikon lens nomenclature is these days) sports a passable resemblance to those earlier lenses in its design and craftmanship. True, much of the lettering and numerals are just printed and probably won’t last long, but otherwise all buttons and levers are genuinely crafted and easy to use, the manual focusing collars turns in a buttery smooth fashion, and there even is a rubber gasket to the rear to impede ingress of dirt and rain. On the downside, there is "G" technology meaning you have to set the apertures from the camera, a way of working which I still find inefficient, clumsy and frustratingly slow. I own 3 different "G" lenses by now (12-24 DX, 17-55 DX and the 200 VR Nikkors), and my critical attitude towards "G" is unabated. I cannot sway away Nikon engineers from plodding along their designated track, but at least I can voice my concern. Yes, I can and I will continue to do so.

There are enough controls and locking buttons on this lens to satisfy even a Hi-Fi freak and I had to spend quite a long time in order to try learning to operate all of these. My son, comfortable with VCR recorders, proved much needed assistance in this endeavour.

There are numerous choices for VR activity (on/off, normal or active mode), locking focus, commencing AF focusing, memory set, memory recall, sound signals on or off, focusing ranges and so on. In my narrow-minded opinion, darkened by an aversion against Oriental VCR recorders and their equally incomprehensive user manuals, the controls just detract from normal operation of the lens. Murphy’s Law assures the control switch will be in a wrong position the critical moment you need any of these features. However, I admit the designers likely considered more broad-minded users than me when they implemented the impressive array of control features found on the VR lens. Sports photographers, for example, should have tons of possibilities to set up the lens the exact way they need. Personally I found a useful setup for myself and then just glued the controls into a fixed position using epoxy glue (hey, it’s my own lens, I have purchased it and can do whatever I want with it).

The AFS 200 Nikkor comes with a big soft-pouch bag holding the lens with a reversed hood and a camera. The accompanying hood HK-31 flares out way too much for my liking, so I quickly replaced it with the more appropriate and narrower HK-19 (from AFS 300/2.8 ). The HK-19 won’t reverse onto the VR lens of course, but with my quick-release plate (see below) affixed to the tripod collar, neither would the original hood. The young ones in your family are ideal targets for getting rid of the superfluous pouch, by the way. It makes a really nice holiday or hiking backpack.

AFS 200/2 VR in the Field
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN
The factory hood delivered with the 200 mm VR acts mainly as a collector of rain, thus is necessary to replace. The HK-19, lifted from my AFS 300 Nikkor, is an ideal replacement and offer sufficient protection from the wrath of the Norwegian weather gods.
AFS Nikkor 200/2 VR mounted on a Sacthler ENG-2 tripod with the Burzynski head.

The tripod collars of modern long Nikkors have been a very mixed blessing. The one of the VR lens is amongst the better designed and the foot below, sitting low onto the collar, gives minor leverage to degrade stability on a tripod. However, it isn’t as sturdily built as I for one wish, there is just a single screw hole for mounting, and the two parts are bolted together with four rather small screws. So, despite its promising external appearance, the tripod mount really is inadequate and allows to let the lens vibrate freely on its own. Not the way I want a bulky lens (mis)behave on a tripod for sure. I added a massively dimensioned plate made of 15 mm aluminium, and drilled another ¼" hole to secure the entire assembly and making it impossible to twist. Still far from perfect, but improved and that’ll do for now.

Compared to its manual-focus predecessor, the new AFS lens is a few centimeters shorter, its outline a little thinner, and the weight greater by some 0.5 kg. All of this contributes to an unexpected heft when you lift the lens for the first time. The human mind simply isn’t expecting this lens to be a true boat anchor. Shooting with it hand-held for some time is a challenge and you need the occasional break to relieve your back and arms. Nice then that the lens is meant to be put down resting on its lens hood or front, both of which are equipped with thick rubber rims to prevent damage.

The AFS speed of this lens is very fast and focusing is reliable thanks to the bright view it offers through the viewfinder. Manual operation of the lens is easy thanks to the generously sized focusing collar and its smooth movement. With all its electronic gimmickery and AFS motor, it's no wonder that the VR lens will exert a considerable drain on the camera's battery. I would estimate that my D2H lost about 40% of its total power due to the use of the VR lens, so keep a spare battery at hand for any important assignment involving this gear.

Image sharpness

In optical terms this AFS lens is more complex than the predecessor, having no less than 3 ED and a "Super ED" glass within its total of 13 elements. The lens protector in front, which used to be an optical flat on earlier Nikon telephoto lenses, now actually is glass having a negative (meniscus) power, so perhaps should be included in the design as well, bringing the total to 14 elements. The lens coating is improved likewise, and lens flare is kept well under control for such a fast lens. However, signifcant ghosting can be induced when the lens is pointed towards the sun. In all fairness it should be stressed that the manual-focus 200 mm f/2 Nikkor behaved far worse in both areas than the new VR lens.

The AFS 200 mm f/2 VR delivers sharper images than can be resolved by the current line of Nikon DSLRs. Simple as that. I no longer test lenses using film so cannot say whether the same behaviour should occur there, but nothing indicates otherwise since performance of 35 mm film is long surpassed by the best digital systems.

Set wide open, the 200 VR delivers bitingly sharp images with just a minute trace of softness and veiling flare, and stopped down one or two stops more it delivers even sharper images with higher contrast as well. From near f/16 to the minimum at f/22, diffraction effects gradually soften the image and lower the contrast, but as this only can be perceived by direct comparison to the performance further up the aperture scale, the lens convinces even at these small aperture settings. All all apertures the image has a perfectly flat field across the entire frame and if there is a light fall-off towards the corners at the wide apertures, I probably would have to use sophisticated lab measuring gear to detect this.

I compared the new lens to its manual brother, the 200/2 ED-IF Nikkor (AIS), and the VR lens delivers equal or better performance at all stops. Contrast is higher, too, and colour saturation is markedly better. The vestiges of chromatic aberration, minute as they were in the MF lens, are virtually non-detectable in the VR model. Thus, you are ensured of getting crisp images coming to life with vividly saturated colours.

Water Colours
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN

Move It
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN

The 200 mm will give me sufficient reach to allow narrow views of a subject, yet not that narrow to make image composition difficult.

The optical performance of the 200 VR was very well maintained when I shot a test series using it in combination with the TC-14E MkII teleconverter. In general, my attitude towards teleconverters has been luke-warm at best. However, I'm pleased to report that image quality of the 200 plus TC-14 combination is a close rival to that of my AFS 300 mm f/2.8 Nikkor, a very fine performance indeed. My test shots indicated the image contrast, quite unexpected, actually increased when the TC-14E/II was attached. A strange and rare form of optical synergy.

Vibration reduction (VR)

Is vibration reduction (VR) technology really the panacea to say good-bye to all unsharp images? Well, yes and no, presumably depending on your needs and ways of shooting. The technology undoubtedly may work miracles and I even managed to get a critically sharp shot at 1/10 sec hand-held, and as long as 1/5 sec with some additional support. For my notoriously shaky hands this is just phenomenal. The master VR control is located on a rotating ring to the rear of the lens. This method works much better than on other VR lenses because you can operate it by touch, there is no need to remove your eye from the viewfinder to locate the switch. I tend to select VR "Normal" mode for most of my VR-assisted shooting. The image in the viewfinder does meander a bit, but since it moves slowly, I didn't notice the feeling of seasickness I've experienced with the 70-200 VR zoom. With VR set to "Active" mode, the finder jumps more haphazardly around, but still no problem as this mode suits shooting from boats or moving vehicles, shooting circumstances than I personally can do without and accordingly try to avoid, thus killing at least two birds with one stone.

A pertinent question always lingering on my mind is whether VR influences image quality. In order to come to grips with possible ill effects of VR, I have done extensive test shooting with the 200 VR lens mounted on a high-quality, professional calibre tripod (Sachtler ENG 2 HD with the Burzynski "Protech" tripod head). For all shots, I allowed VR to run for about 1 minute to ensure it had all the vibration data it possibly could crave for, before I tripped the shutter using a cable release.

The data indicate clearly that VR does indeed degrade image quality when the lens is tripod-mounted. If the shutted speed is fast, you won’t experience this to any large extent, however, increase the exposure duration and you might be less fortunate. And to exacerbate the situation, there is a broad range of shutter speeds in which VR negatively impacts image sharpness even to degree of making the image downright unsharp. The problem area creeps in at around 1/60 sec and is fully developed at 1/15 – 1/20 sec. At slower speeds, the issue of image deterioration gradually diminishes and is largely gone by 1 sec or so. However, you get the occasional jolted picture even at such long exposures, so the message coming through, loud and clear, is simply as follows: Don’t mix VR with quality tripods.

I arrived at these results, which admittedly weren’t exactly unexpected, by carefully comparing images taken with and with VR switched on, using my D2H camera at its ISO 200 setting. All NEF files were processed in Bibble 4.0 (courtesy Eric Hyman of www.bibblelabs.com). Since everything else were kept constant, except for VR activity of course, I firmly believe this mediocre performance of VR technology is for real and not exceptional for my way of shooting with the AFS 200/2 VR lens. This is not a question of camera shake or mirror slap, because I consistently get sharp images when VR is not activated, also across the entire range of shutter speeds shown to be problematic with VR.

So, what is Nikon’s take on such issues. Officially, the brochure accompanying the lens claims there is no need to switch VR off for tripod use. We know by now this simply isn’t true. However, Nikon partially admits this statement isn’t entirely correct by adding a vague phrase about "unlocked tripod heads". Having a firmly locked tripod head ensures you will get the exact framing of the image which you may need, so unlocking the head just to allow VR to function better is not the optimal solution for many shooting occasions. You’ll be better served by moving the VR slider to the OFF position. On the other hand, if you have a lesser quality tripod, shoot fast-moving subjects, plan to do panning shots at slow shutter speeds, or simply need the tripod to ease the weight of the lens off your back, then VR might continue to be a welcome functionality and the lack of a clamped-down tripod head might not be entirely critical. You do have to know that VR can be a mixed blessing to fully appreciate its bright side and to avoid the darker side of its sophisticated technology.

Bokeh

You would expect a long, fast lens to render the background pleasantly unsharp. The manual precedessor, the 200/2, did this and the AFS version does it one better. In fact, it has about the nicest bokeh of any lens I’ve ever used. So soft, veiled and delicate as baby’s skin. Designating the out-of-focus rendition of this lens as "Creamy " isn’t encompassing enough, there are much more to it than that.

I find interesting differences in the tactility of out-of-focus rendition between the MF and VR 200 Nikkors, however. The old lens by way of its lower image contrast imparts a roundness to the entire image, often very attractive, but nowhere as endearing as the better defined yet buttery soft bokeh of the VR lens.

Birch Leaves
© Bjørn Rørslett/NN
The nice rendition of the out-of-focus area is simply stunning. So smooth, delicate and yet with a certain bite. There is nothing like this in the entire Nikkor line-up.

The Summing Up

Nikon has managed to come up with a lens which surely is one of the finest ever to emerge from the Land of the Rising Sun. My criticism of the newcomer is just nitpicking and should not detract anyone willing to put down the money to get a 200 VR lens for themselves. They won't regret it. This lens is a dream to work with and the results are a match made in heaven, too. This is simply the one lens I'm not willing to let go, a sure must-have. It is so good that I for once am willing to overlook its pitiful tripod mount.

Go to the resource page for this lens

10 reasons to join us at Sabi Sabi

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:32:14 +0000

As a ranger at Sabi Sabi and aspiring photographer, there is one thing I look forward to in the year and that is the Nikongear visit. Six days of pure photography and all in the comfort of Little Bush Camp.  With two exclusive land-rovers to take you around the beautiful reserve, two experienced trackers and guides who are experienced in wildlife photography there is no doubt that you will end up in the best positions to get the shots you envisaged. Here are the top 10 reasons why I think you should join us.

No. 1
The days start off early in order to get the best light possible and to catch the animals while they are at their most active. After an early morning wake up, a cup of coffee accompanied by fresh fruit and muffins We head out on the safari and watch the sun rise of the African bush whilst listening the birds singing their dawn chorus. We also get to enjoy the sunsets on the afternoon safari where we will stop for a sundowner.

No. 2
All the times of the year that Nikongear join us have been chosen as the best times of the year for game viewing and comfort. The bush is typically not as dense as at the end of the rainy season allowing us to more easily locate the animals and then photograph them.

No. 3
We are located in the area that has the highest density of leopard in the world. This means that your chances of seeing and photographing these beautiful creatures will increase exponentially.  Due to their territorial nature we have a good knowledge of their habits and their life stories so you will not only get the opportunity to photograph them but will also leave with a greater understanding of them.

No. 4
Our lions, known as the Southern Pride, have had an interesting history and they currently have no males in the pride. With 9 cubs to protect and two male lions trying to take over the pride, the level of interaction between these lions has increased. We will spend possibly hours with these great cats when we can find them allowing us to get a look into their lives as well as being able to wait for the perfect shot.

No. 5
Not to place all the emphasis on the cats, the rest of the big five can be viewed up close and personal. Elephants, rhino and buffalo frequent the reserve and can offer some great photo opportunities. The thick skinned herbivores enjoy the areas around the camp and are often visitors to the lodge but your real experiences with these giants will be out on safari. With little fear of the vehicles we are able to get very close to them without stressing the animal, which allows for some unique shots.

No. 6
At Sabi Sabi we are not limited to using the roads and for any of the big 5, cheetah or wild dog we are allowed to follow these creatures through the bush as long as the conditions are suitable. We do this with the greatest care for the environment and if any damage is cause it is rehabilitated. This does allow another unique view of all these animals, allowing us to stay with the animals till we are all satisfied that we have got the shot we came for.

http://www.photographers.travel/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/PT016.jpg[img]

[b]No. 7[/b]
The big 5 are not the only animals that you will be able to photograph as we have a wealth of other creatures that range from the very common to the rarely seen.

[img]http://www.photographers.travel/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/PT35-1024x682.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.photographers.travel/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/PT34-682x1024.jpg[/img]

[b]No. 8[/b]
If it birds you are after and even if its not, with a bird list almost 400 birds strong we have some great variety and each of them provide great photographic opportunities.

[img]http://www.photograp...011/10/pt48.jpg

No. 9
Afternoon safaris continue into the night and with the use of a spotlight to view the nocturnal creatures, such as the big cats, you will be able to crank up the ISO and test your skills at night. As night sets in the cats very often get active and we regularly follow them on hunts offering a different view on the lives of these creatures. The spotlights also offer different lighting perspectives to play with which can have great results.

No. 10
As the night draws to a close we will enjoy the exquisite cuisine prepared  by our chef and enjoyed under the African sky. All the meals at the lodge will blow your mind but the experience of eating your meal surrounded by lanterns and looked down on by thousands of stars over head will be one of those that stays with you forever.

Richard De Gouveia (aka Ranger Rich) is an avid photographer and a ranger at Sabi Sabi Private Game Reserve, where we will be spending some time on our 2012 Nikongear.com Safari.

The Fuji X100

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:59:19 +0000

I am going to make this as short as I can. I think perhaps some of you Nikoniacs also flirt with other brands and "toy" cameras and might be interested. It's impossible to cover all aspects of the camera and for instance dpreview have done an excellent review of it in their usual lengthy style. Personally I've shot some 1300 frames through the X100 over the past few weeks, both business and pleasure. I think I've sort of come to grips with the little fellah. So, this is basically some of the impressions and observations I've made in this time.

Body and physical attributes
Well, it's kind of small, a bit to large for a pocket (cargo pants would be okay), but at 450 grams or so it's certainly no problem carrying around. It feels and probably is quite solid (mine have hit the floor, literally, lens hood took the brunt of the fall though). It feels like what I call good build quality. Any modern Nikon I've handled D80/D90/D300/D7000/D700/D3 had one or other point where you could feel slight movement in the outer plastic layer, often around the battery compartment. The X100 is as tight as anything and feels like a solid, trustworthy tool, almost like a good slide calliper.

General use
A lot have been said on the menu system and various firmware quirks and thats with good reason. This isn't a mature camera with several generations of development backing it, more bits and pieces from what is (presumably) Fujifilms compacts. Some of the bugs and quirks will be improved with the promised future firmware releases, some will undoubtedly remain because they are design choices, no matter how much we would disagree. Yet, fact remains, and this is important, the camera works, it shoots, exposes and produces images reliably. No 9 FPS or tracking focus able to follow a 5 year old ADHD kid fueled on ice-cream and cola, but it locks accurately and securely and I've had very few OOF shots, even in poor light. You have to adjust your focusing technique to CDAF peculiarities and find some kind of contrast do drop your focus point on though, especially in poor light.

The combination of OVF/EVF/LCD is fantastic, three options of what to look through to frame the shot is very useful and all three "modes" work very well and the switching between them is almost instant. Mine spends most of the time in OVF mode, although I do switch to the EVF for critically accurate framing every now and then. Seeing more than what you get makes it easier to frame and compose shots and also to anticipate things entering the frame. If you've ever shot a rangefinder you know what I mean. The OVF is however much brighter and contains loads more information (which can be customized) than any old rangefinder.

IQ
This is where the X100 shines - Image quality. A finely tuned lens and sensor combo, although "only" 12mp, can work magic and so does the X100. Images are sharp from edge to edge and have a very fine quality and look to them. The lens itself is not quite as punchy as certain modern Nikon or Zeisses, it's a different kind of rendering or drawing of colors and transitions, perhaps a bit old school or somewhat subdued/neutral but not as cool as a 85 1.4D or 105 DC. The lens is sharp already at F/2.0, but struggle a bit at focus distances shorter than about 80cm, stopping down to F/4.0 at short focus distances puts things back on track. I understand this is down to some of the compromises they had to do to make it so small. At distances beyond 80cm up to infinity everything is pretty much as good as it gets today. Sharpness is exceptional across the frame, some very slight and easily correctable distortion and pretty much non-existing CA or other aberrations. My jaw literally dropped when I saw the first F/2.0 shots at medium distances and at infinity, the lack of nasty mushiness in the corners and flat, consistent frame..well I cannot stop drooling over the files. There's some vignetting, especially wide open, perhaps a little over one stop at most.

Being primarily a DX-user, I kind of struggle finding a ~24mm F-mount lens as capable as the Fujinon. Probably the only "modern" performance-wise comparable lenses are the 24G, 14-24G and the Zeiss 21mm, although all these are a bit apples and oranges compared to the Fujinons maximum aperture and crop sensor image circle. I can't resist mentioning that all these lenses cost as much or more than the X100 and are actually physically equally large or larger than the camera. Kind of puts things into perspective even if it's just a silly and not really valid comparison.

The files that come out of the X100, be they jpgs or RAWs really have to bee seen and experienced firsthand. The jpg engine is the best I've ever seen, I've never really been that "oooh" over the "famous" Olympus jpgs, but these are something that (almost) makes me reconsider my following of the RAW-cult. The RAWs do remind me a lot of the 12mp Nikon files from the D90, D5000 and D300 in terms of DR and ability to recover highlights and shadows. They don't have quite as much headroom as the D7000, but it's clearly much more refined/evolved algorithms at work here than the slightly outdated 12mp Nikons. The really big difference is the amount of detail. The X100 seems to have a light AA filter and/or better internal processing, because there's more detail than I'm used to from my D90, even with very good glass. I can't quantify this or measure it, it's a subjective impression and should be taken with a few bucketfuls of salt.

High ISO noise is something that interests me as I often shoot in very poor light. Simnply put, the X100 is very close to my D7000 in this department, basically meaning a notch or two above the D90, just below the D700 in most areas. The noise is, like with the D7000, mainly of the luminance variety, meaning it's easy to work with. The X100 files do not however retain color as well as the D7000, but it is clearly better than the D90. One of the reasons the D7000 high ISO files look so good is the ability to maintain color fidelity, something even the D700 struggle with, although the D700 have slightly less noise overall. Basically, the X100 performs extremely well and puts the old but tried and trusted Sony (?) 12.3mp sensor to good use, paired with a couple of years worth of development in processing. It's a camera that you comfortably can shoot down to ISO 3200 and even 6400 with careful exposure and post processing. Oh, the places you can go with 1/40th at F/2.0 and ISO 3200!

Final words
The many nay-sayers, rumors and complaints over the X100 can scare anyone. Yet, the growing enthusiast community, even dedicated forums and the many very, very nice images I saw from it convinced me to give it a go, knowing I could return it. All these people could not be all wrong. Quite frankly, I realize now it's changed the way I shoot and brought a lot of image-making joy back into my life. It goes with me anywhere and I love knowing that I have a camera with me that I trust IQ-wise to the same degree that I trust my DSLRs. For specialized photographic tasks such as macro, sports, portraiture and so forth, there's no way I won't choose to use a DSLR, but for a lot of other stuff the X100 is very much up to the task. Tthe kind of shooting I do, even the paid stuff, is not very demanding and I would not hesitate to use the X100 for an environmental PJ-type portrait for instance.

Yet...this is a camera for those who knows what they are doing, accept the merits and drawbacks of a single prime and are able and willing to learn a new camera with a sometimes confusing logic and some quirks. It's no denying that this is a camera that will feel all to limiting to a lot of people and if you come from a DSLR and expect DSLR-like focus performance and burst rates you will be sadly disappointed.

IF you give it the time, the reward is a camera that is a pleasure to shoot, use and carry while still giving you images of a quality that rivals the state-of-the-art crop sensor DSLRs out there. I'd actually be so bold, that even with the rather high retail price of the X100, you'd struggle getting better IQ for the same price if you consider what a body and high-grade 24mm lens cost today. In FX land there's a whole forest of great 35mms, but then we're also talking several times the weight and size, lens + body. There's also no doubt people respond differently to a small, "old" camera like the X100 than a huge honking black DSLR. Try pulling up a D3 with a 70-200 in a casual social situation and see how people react

I think that rounds it off. If there's any interest I'll come back with some definitely unscientific image samples and more impressions later on.

Comments on this review

Editor's note:
Sindre Falk (M4cr0s) is a Norwegian member of Nikongear.com based in Oslo. Visit his website & blog here.

Review: AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 G ED IF VR Nikkor (...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:05:28 +0000

The Long March Towards Revolution:
AF-S 70-200 mm f/2.8 G ED IF VR Nikkor Reviewed
by Bjørn Rørslett

Editor's note: this is an old review from Naturfotograf.com that has been re-published on Nikongear.com.

1. Introduction

At last, about a year after its initial announcement, the long-awaited addition to Nikon's limited arsenal of vibration reduction (VR) technology arrived. This lens is the natural successor and replacement to the current AFS 80-200 mm f/2.8 Nikkor, and likely will find its place in many a professional shooter's bag. Aspiring or amateur photographers will enjoy this new Nikkor as well, despite its possible steep price tag.

The 70-200 VR heralds a new line of lens development from Nikon. Silent wave focusing motors and vibration reduction technology unite to create a new and exciting level of technological achievement for Nikon users. However, this new pinnacle of technology brings along with it repercussions which are impossible to overlook. No longer is backwards compatibilty, once the ultimate goal for Nikon designers, considered an overriding major concern for their lenses. Nikon has played up to this for a while by crippling more and more features on their new cameras so as not to allow using MF lenses in practice, although such lenses still mount. Thus I'm not in the least surprised by this poignant blow to Nikon traditions, more in a sad mode as it were.

This VR lens is made for the new generation of Nikon shooters which may have grown up neither seeing nor using manual-focusing lenses from the legendary Nikkor past, so they don't know what they miss. The generally held view that Nikon's classic "F"-mount, the basic design of which dates back to the end of the 1950's, could not cater for future evolution such as combinations of AFS, VR etc., has been proven false. All AFS lenses I've seen have 10 electronic contacts although the current cameras only have 8, so it's fairly safe to say the "F" bayonet could have future tricks up its venerable mount.

The lack of an aperture collar on the lens ("G" type) in practice means you cannot use the VR lens on earlier pro cameras such as Nikon F, F2, and F3, and its operation on F4 although possible is severely restricted (you have to shoot in P or S mode and VR won't work). The 70-200 VR however springs to life on an F100, F5 and all of the new digital SLRs. Presumably it will work on lower-end new Nikons as well (Nikon literature will provide the details).

I think the AFS and G features quickly will prevail the Nikkor line, with VR capability thrown in for middle- and high-end optics. What we witness now might well be a planned obsolescence of the MF Nikkors. Such a pity because many of the old champions never were dethroned by superior designs, just by newer lenses or more features.

Personally I'm not too keen on having a standard zoom lens with this focal range, for a good deal of reasons. However, I realise I'm an exception to the generally held view here, so I just go on reviewing the lens for the benefit of other people. What one wouldn't do for an appreciative audience.

2. Appearance and Handling

Constructed with 21 elements in 15 groups, the 70-200 mm f/2.8 VR is an optical cutting-edge design. No less than 5 of the elements are expensive ED glass to give the lens a tight control on the ever-present chromatic aberrations. This assures high quality on today's digital SLRs by making cleaner images less troubled with colour noise. I haven't seen drawings of the optical design so cannot tell whether aspherical elements have been used. Filter thread size follows the current 77 mm standard for pro lenses. The lenscap LF-77 is a new design (similar to the one on AFS 24-85 but bigger), which clips on the front and is about as easily lost as all other such items. The lenscap distinguishes itself by being a poor fit on other 77 mm threaded lenses. Throw it away and replace it by the earlier version while they still are produced. Even better, stockpile the older types. A scalloped lens hood, HB-29, is delivered with the lens together with a soft case and other paraphernalia. Drop the never-ready case but do put on the hood. It surely is needed (see later section on flare and ghosting).

The customary golden ring, designating an ED construction, is placed at the extreme front end, adjacent to a tiny read-out window for the distance scale. No IR focusing index or depth-of-field indication of any kind is given. A series of AF-lock buttons (the purpose and significance of which always has escaped me, but who am I to know such secrets) follows next and beyond that there is a generously-sized collar for manual focusing. The focusing collar is wider towards the front of the lens to give a very positive and easy grip. Zooming is by another collar located around the mid part of the lens barrel, and the focal lengths are engraved in white lettering making them easy to read. The lens barrel itself has a smooth finely crinkled-paint finish, which looks nice and probably withstand wear better than the earlier AFS lenses.

The operational switches are neatly grouped together in a control panel. Lettering unfortunately is not engraved and is likely to show considerable wear over time. What fraction of a Yen is saved by not engraving these numerals?

The controls themselves are sliding levers which need quite small fingers to be operated with ease. However, in practice this isn't so important because most will rarely be used. Personally, I would have superglued the M/A and Focus range limiter switches into a permanent position. By putting VR mode to "Normal", you really only need the occasional setting of VR to "Off".

The nice and broad rotating tripod collar can be seen to the right. The locking screw is on the small side and ought to be replaced with a larger unit to allow better grip and more positive locking torque.

A commendable short tripod leg juts out below the lens barrel and can easily be detached. The removable section looks a little on the lean side, but nevertheless provides a good support for the lens. It couples through a dove-tailed slot onto the lens and this design allows for easy user modification of collar if this is wanted. The improved design with its broad and sturdy rotating collar could well result from a massive criticism directed against poor tripod mounts found on some recent Nikkors. Since I have been quite outspoken on this subject, I am pleased Nikon have listened to my comments and reviews. Anyhow, that's the way I like to regard the outcome.

The lens itself belies its physical size and weight (a trifle under 1.5 kg) when I first picked it up. No doubt its narrow outline contributes to this feeling. However, you will likely reconsider the matter after having camera plus lens slung over your shoulder for some hours. There is a mandatory lens hood, HB-29, which provides some rudimentary protection against stray light and flare. For once the hood clicks positively into position and there is even a locking catch to hold it firmly onto the lens itself.

The rear of the lens has a rubber gasket to prevent ingress of moisture and water drops to the inside electronics, a clever and welcome feature (also found on new professional-class Canon lenses). The enhanced weather sealing is facilitated by the lack of a traditional aperture collar, because this allows for a much more snug fit of the gasket.

The focusing speed is thanks to the AFS technology very fast and responsive, and lives pretty well up to the "silent" designation. Hunting for focus is not commonly observed unless light levels are low, which is only to be expected from any AF system. Mounted on my F5, the 70-200 VR responds ever so slightly slower than on my D1-series models and low-light hunting was more frequent, too.

Near focus occurs at 1.4 m and 1.5 m in manual and AF focusing mode, respectively. This is sufficient for nice tight-composed portraits, that is if you haven't scared your victim away by the sheer size of the lens with its impressive hood attached. The lens is an internal-focusing (IF) design so its total length will not change with the focus setting.

The lens handles with ease as such and I found the controls quite well laid out, but see the follow paragraph. Hand-holding the VR lens is facilitated when the tripod mount is removed and it's obvious the designers catered particularly for this contingency.

I firmly oppose the idea that lens handling is improved by having to set apertures from the camera dial(s), because this entails forcing your right hand to do all the work. I program all my cameras (supporting such a mode) to set apertures by the collar on the lens itself. Thus, I can use my left hand for aperture control, focusing and the occasional zooming while my right hand can do exposure correction or AF by the rear controls, plus operate the shutter release.

This is my personal workflow which has served me well for decades of photography and it functions in an equal manner whether my camera is tripod-mounted or hand-held. Your mileage may vary based upon your personal shooting manners. Being left-handed, I found my right hand tired prematurely by the new chores heaped upon it and I did not like the situation at all. In particular I never came to grips with the operation of the sub-command dial located in front of the camera, and felt that aperture setting instead of being intuitive had become awkward. Circumventing this problem by moving aperture control to the rear command wheel would cause conflicts with the way I handle other lenses so was not an option or solution to me.

Personally, I dislike "G" design more than ever and I simply don't want it for my own gear, now or in the future. However, please feel entirely free to draw an opposite conclusion.

3. Optical Performance

Sharpness is traditionally one of the more important criteria for photographic lenses. We all want our lenses to be tack sharp, period end period. Yet sharpness by itself cannot guarantee anything, and I repeat any thing, in terms of the ensuing pictorial outcome. The world is flooded with sharp, dull, and uninspiring images, simply because the photographer believed his job only was to press the button and let the camera and lens do the rest. This is a paradox the handling of which each and every one of us has to balance in our own chosen manner.

I for one strive for visual impression - not visual accuracy - in my photography, so spend considerable time on assignment to circumvent restrictions imparted by a dull photographic life-likeness. I do care about lens sharpness by all means, but not as the panacea to solve all photographic problems. Commitment to the process of creating images will outperform any MTF plot any time. It's nice to have a sharp lens but better still to know to which ends it can best be used. Oh well, I continue to evaluate visual quality by shooting test pictures of brick walls outside my office, I always have and probably always shall do assessments this way. At least this procedure provides me with a guideline as to how the lens performs. I always cross reference my observations with original slides (or files) from similar lenses so to have a consistency on my rankings.

After a few day's worth of testing, it became painfully obvious that my D1X had developed a severe "back-focus" issue. Critical sharpness simply was not present on my test images unless the lens was stopped down beyond f/11. Initially, I suspected the lens itself might be the culprit causing of unsharpness so repeated painstakingly all my test shots (hundreds of them) with my D1H and was relieved - and saddened - by the fact that all of these were in sharp focus, as they should. My D1X eventually was revived in the premises of my Nikon repair shop and enabled me to finalise my sharpness tests. For what they are worth, they are depicted below:

Subjective Evaluation of the AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 G VR ED-IF Nikkor

(Remember these values give qualitative - not quantitative - data, and thus averaging the values is meaningless)
Performance at 70mm

Performance at 200mm
All tests obtained with Nikon D1X using NEF raw files processed in Bibble 3.04. Lens mounted on a Sachtler ENG 2 CF carbon tripod with Burzynski head.

Overall the AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens delivers an excellent image quality across its entire focal range. The slight drop noted at f/5.6 towards 200 mm might be a quirk particular to my lens sample and should not cause any major concern. Since I only had a single lens available for testing, the deviation has no statistical foundation on its own either. Only when I can reproduce wiggles like this with other lenses (such as I did on samples of the 400/3.5 Nikkor, for example) do I put any emphasis on them. I would characterise the 70-200 VR as giving professional class performance at all focal lengths.

The decline in performance at smaller f-numbers is inherent in all lenses and is caused by diffraction. If anything, image quality of the VR 70-200 hold up better than expected when the lens was stopped well down.

Chromatic aberration (CA) was virtually absent from any of the brick wall test images at any aperture and focal setting. This in its turn resulted in a high-contrast rendition with vibrantly satured colours, typical of the best of the optics in which ED glass is employed.

Illumination was even across the entire digital frame at f/2.8 at all focal settings, so corner light fall-off was absolutely negligible. I guess there may be some extreme corner fall-off with the lens set wide open on an F5, however (I no longer use film for ordinary testing).

Geometric distortion is of the barrel type at 70 mm and is clearly visible there. As you zoom the lens to longer focal lengths, distortion is reduced and around 105 mm you have a lens eminently suitable for architecture work. Predictably, at 200 mm there is some, but not excessive, pincushion distortion.

4. Vibration Reduction (VR)

A sound scientific approach is saying something doesn't work, and then go on to try to get evidence of the opposite. So, my basic attitude was to pretend VR had no influence at all. It took me less than one minute to shatter that hypothesis so I now accept VR really works. See the test images on display below. Isn't science a great thing. The lower the speed the greater the risk of getting unsharp images, but I consistently got acceptably sharp pictures at 1/20 sec (200 mm), even down to 1/5 sec in some cases.

I have no urgent need to understand the principles behind vibration reduction technology provided VR does it job reliably and unnoticed. Nikon literature gives a lot of details for those feeling compelled to be updated on its technological achievement. For me, VR is just another technological 'black-box'. And it surely works.

(left) VR Off - Hand Held VR On - Normal Mode

Normally, I wouldn't dream of shooting hand-held at shutter speeds as low as 1/5 sec with a 200 mm lens. However, with VR working its magic even such unprecedented actions can be contemplated.

The tiny crop above (no sharpening applied in or out of camera) represents just 1.5% of the D1X image area and clearly shows that even at 1/5 sec, adequate image sharpness may be present in hand-held shots. I like to stress 'may' because not every shot will turn out to satisfaction, but you are ensured of a quite healthy ratio of keepers.

VR mode Normal is recommended for the normal shooting situation, and in this mode the VR circuits will detect that the lens is being panned and not attempt to reduce or correct for that movement. Thus, there is no switch to set for this operation. Panning isn't my favourite way of shooting, but I tried it out and the systems works exactly as described by Nikon.

The more aggressive Active mode will detect and correct motion in any direction so cannot be employed in conjunction with panning shots. This mode is targeted towards unpredictable and unstable shooting conditions, for instance on deck of a boat. Once again, I'll likely get sea-sick under that contingency so taking pictures would be my last concern. However the VR system is there for you if you want it. With the lens in Active VR mode, the viewfinder image gets a bit jittery on its own, more than enough to introduce nausea for me. You are warned.

When you focus using the AF-ON button (found on rear of newer Nikons), Nikon warns in their pamphlet that VR is not set into motion. To commence VR operation, the shutter-release button must be pressed half-way down. Depending on the amount of corrective work to be done when VR kicks in, there sometimes may be a lag between the final push on the release and the taking of the picture. With VR set to normal mode, I had very few incidents of this kind. However, with the Active mode selected, in conjunction with the camera being set to single-frame shooting or focus priority, you may lose the occasional shot simply because the camera refuses to fire at the decisive moment. The risk of encountered this issue must be balanced against the increased chance of getting a sharp image.

While operating, the VR circuitry might emit a low-pitched humming sound, interspersed with sharper clicking. The sounds are quite low and may pass unnoticed in many cases. More and louder clicking sounds are heard when the VR mode is set to Active. At least you are assured that the VR feature has sprung into action.

All the VR in the world won't halt your subject in its own motion, so slow shutter speeds always bring with them a chance for unsharpness, VR or not VR.

Nikon is ambiguous as to the need for switching VR off when this lens is mounted on a tripod. Their pamphlet can be interpreted to indicate a shaky tripod or head might benefit from having VR switched on in Normal mode.The first VR offering, AF 80-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 Nikkor did not like tripods at all either with or without VR (largely due to its horribly designed tripod mount). The new VR lens behaves differently.

I shot a comprehensive test series to clarify whether VR impacted performance on a tripod. The results indicate that VR should not be put into operation when you deploy the lens on high-quality tripods such as the Sachtler range. A small, but detectable loss of detail resulted with VR in Normal mode, and the degradation of detail increased with the Active VR setting. On the other hand, for less critical use or when more modest tripods are pressed into service, little harm is done if you forget to switch VR off.

5. When the image is out of focus

Bokeh relates to the fashion in which the out-of-focus areas of the image is rendered. The word itself is of Japanese origin, and the importance and even existence of 'good' bokeh have been a hotly debated topic for years. Suffice to say that some lenses have it, some not and some like it hot.

Amongst the Nikkors, the AFD 85 mm f/1.4 lens has long enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for its superb bokeh. Thus, in images taken with that lens, the sharply focused subject is set against a pleasingly silky smooth background. The transition from in-focus to out-of-focus occurs gradually. A good example of poor bokeh is the AFS 300 mm f/2.8 Nikkor, which despite its excellent sharpness tends towards producing hash backgrounds when it is stopped down. A large number of aperture blades gives a more circular opening when the lens is stopped down, but this in itself is not sufficient as witnessed by the 85 and 300 mm Nikkors both of which have a 9-bladed aperture.

It became quickly obvious the 70-200VR had a very pleasing image rendition, in fact, the images showed an attractive bokeh up with the very best of lenses. I did a test series in which the reigning bokeh champion, AFD 85 mm f/1.4 Nikkor, was pitched against the VR newcomer. To make realistic assumptions I shot only hand-held with or without VR activated (hence a slightly different composition of the test images), and delibrately shot branches set against a bright background. This is a very revealing subject for bokeh and most lenses will render out-of-focus lines in a harsh and unpleasant manner. Not so the VR lens, as depicted below. Clearly seen also is that VR mode does have a bearing on bokeh. The more active the VR, the less attractive the bokeh. And the king on the hill, AFD 85/1.4, still holds it top position against the new challenger. The difference isn't that great, however.

AFD Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4 1/1500 sec, f/2.8
(Note the absolutely marvellous, creamy rendition of the out-of-focus background. The attractive bokeh is a hallmark of this superb portrait lens)

AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 G Nikkor VR @85 mm 1/1500 sec, f/2.8 VR off

AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 G Nikkor VR @85 mm 1/1500 sec, f/2.8 VR Normal

AFS 70-200 mm f/2.8 G Nikkor VR @85 mm 1/1500 sec, f/2.8 VR Active

Because VR influences, and may degrade, bokeh, the photographer should have this fact in mind while shooting details are planned. If utmost image smoothness is required, you might consider switching VR off and work with a tripod-mounted lens instead.

Towards 200 mm the background blurring attained by the 70-200 VR was creamy and silky smooth, entirely up to the bokeh of the very best performers. VR mode once again did influence bokeh, but less obvious as with the shorter focal settings of the lens.

6. Flare and ghosting

A zoom lens with 21 elements would, despite sophisticated multi-coating treatment, be prone to unwanted internal reflections. The 70-200 VR tries its very best to live up to or rather exceed expectations in this area.

As shown by the test pictures (below), grazing light striking across the front element give rise to huge amounts of ghosting. A long row of hot spots march across the image. Strong flare lowers image contrast to wash out details especially towards the long end of the zoom range.

The poor performance exhibited by the 70-200 VR lens came as a surprise and underpins my suspicion that flare control is not a primary parameter for contemporary lens designs. I like to add that the glass surfaces of my review sample were in a pristine shape without even the tiniest speck of dust on them and of course the big sunshade was used all the time, but evidently to no avail. Direct backlighting is a major problem area for this zoom lens.

70 mm f/22 At least 15 hot-spot ghosts (from each lens group?) together with a plethora of larger secondary ghosts make an ugly impression.

200 mm f/22 Huge amounts of flare add to the prominent ghost reflections of the aperture, and effectively destroys image content.

When however direct light is kept off the front of the lens, flare was under better control and ghosting occurred less frequently. Every user has to decide whether or not this issue is of concern for the intended applications of the 70-200. Some people may be severely troubled, while others manage to get off by less devastating results. I guess it all depends on the way you tend to shoot your assignments.

A question often asked is whether flare and ghosting depend on the aperture setting. The answer to this is that flare tends to diminish when the lens is stopped down, while ghosting becomes more predominant visually. However, at the minimum aperture used in the test above, the image area impacted by ghosting should be as small as possible. At wider apertures the ghosts themselves may be less apparent and simply add to the generel level of flare.

Zoom lenses have always been susceptible to excessive ghosting, often combined with a moderate resistance to flare as well. Still, there is food for thought that even my venerable old-timer 50-300 mm f/4.5 ED Nikkor manages significantly better than the 70-200 VR.

7. Summary and Conclusions

This addition to the stabilised stable of Nikkors has been long awaited. Without doubt the wait did deliver an excellent lens with a lot of positive surprises, besides some (likely unavoidable) negative traits. The important point here is that you get a package crammed with optical and technological achievements, which combine to make this lens a highly versatile tool for virtually all photographers. This lens may be expensive but it certainly offers the results you've paid for. Its poor performance for back-lit scenes is a draw-back only if you cannot work around this issue, so provided the photographer is up to the task, the VR lens still delivers. The attractive bokeh will endear the 70-200 VR to its users as well.

This lens is slated to become a legendary Nikkor, offering excellent optical performance and a VR system which does its job in a truly professional manner. A pity for Nikon I'm not a candidate buyer of this lens, but Nikon probably isn't too bothered because a host of other people certainly will line up to purchase this lens.

Put VR capability through its paces for creating your own visions. This feature may expand your image-making potential under low-light situations. Here, in the woods at dusk, I managed to get precisely the image I'd envisioned.
(D1H, AFS 70-200 mm VR lens @105 mm f/8, 1/2 sec, VR mode Active)

Review: Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG EX HSM

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 07:08:40 +0000

Introduction

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG EX HSM is a super fast aperture, short telephoto lens. This is a new design for full-frame (and DX) sensors from Sigma, incorporating the Hyper Sonic Motor (HSM) found in the rest of their EX range of lenses.

Application

There is a lot of debate amongst photographers these days as to whether there is a real need for a fast f/1.4 aperture lens in modern photography.

On the one hand people are saying that with modern sensors like those found in top end Nikon bodies such as the D3-series, D700 and now D7000, you’re able to shoot at ISO values that were previously unworkable, such as 3200 and even 12,800 in the case of the D3S. Why then would you need to claw back 2 stops in aperture terms and lose massively on depth of field? Not to mention the huge premium you will be paying for glass that does that?

On the other hand those photographers who use fast aperture lenses are saying that the super fast 1.4 apertures bring something visually unique to the table – total subject isolation and smooth out of focus areas. Not to mention the fact that in low light situations these kinds of lenses really do bring about a whole new dimension to photography because now not only do you have the extra stops on your sensor, but you also have them on your lens, and when used in conjunction with one another they make for compelling photography in difficult lighting situations.

I tend to agree with the latter argument, but at the same time I look at each lens I own as being something that has to carry a fair share of the workload to justify its existence in my line up. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a lens that I am seldom going to use.

For me the super fast lenses are all about depth of field and how you can use that creatively, so if I am going to carry a lens like this, I want to be able to use it for its ability to shorten the d.o.f. in generous dollops. This 85mm 1.4 does that pretty handily.

This is very much a specialist lens and finding work for it is going to depend to a large degree of the kind of photographic intent you have. Personally I find this focal length difficult to work with because it doesn’t quite fit my style of working. The minimum focusing distance of 0.85m is a bit too long to get in close to smaller subjects, such as food and small products where its shallow depth of field would work well. However, on a DX frame that might not be as much of a problem and DX shooters might very well consider this lens for use in food photography, especially where your only light is ambient and you’re doing selective focus on parts of the dish. It will work very well there.

Conventional thinkers all agree that 85mm on FX is the beginning of classic portraiture focal length. If I am shooting head and shoulders type portraits using this lens I find I am standing a little bit too close to the subject for my liking (like 1 to 1.2m from their faces). It’s not that I have halitosis or bad BO or anything, but getting that close to somebody’s face for a photograph puts me on the inside of their personal space where I will run the risk of unsettling them, something that always comes through in the pictures.

Having said that, if you are using this lens to make that kind of portrait, you must understand two things:

1.This is a very sharp lens at any aperture so every line and wrinkle in that person’s face is going to stand out.

2.If you open this lens wider than 2.8 your depth of field is going to be so shallow that you may find only a small section of the subject’s face will be in focus. It’s quite possible to have the tip of a nose sharp and the eyes out of focus when using the lens at f/2 or wider, especially when you’re working up close with the subject. Make sure you focus on the right part of the face if you’re aiming for a shallow depth of field!

The shot of a ruler below (this is a significant crop, btw) shows just how limited your depth of field is when shooting at f/1.4 and the minimum focusing distance of 85cm with this lens.

I wouldn’t recommend a lens like this for portraiture simply on the basis of the working distance on FX format, as well as the sharpness issue. It’s too sharp for flattery, which in most cases is what you get asked to do when making portraits. This might be fine if you’re doing some kind of reportage journalism and you don’t have to explain yourself to the subject later, but trust me, if you’re formally photographing women of a more mature age, you’re going to pick up flak!

Anyway, you’re not reading this review to make a decision on what type of photography you should be doing with an 85mm f/1.4, so on the next page I will get into the performance aspects that will help you decide whether or not to buy this lens.

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Aesthetics & Handling

This is a good-looking lens from Sigma. Of all the Sigma’s I have reviewed in recent times this one is hands down the prettiest of them all. The notorious Sigma matt grey paint is completely gone, replaced with a silky looking poly-carbonate black finish.

It feels good and solid in the hand and is significantly heavier than Nikon’s 85mm 1.4 AF-S equivalent. This lens tips the scales at 725g (25.6oz) as opposed to the Nikon’s 595g (21oz). It does have an extra element and one fewer element group compared to the Nikon, which probably accounts for this difference.

Focus Ring
The manual focus ring just above the focus distance window is nice and wide. It allows for manual focus over-ride when in AF mode. The overall feel of the manual focus is OK but obviously a way off the feel of a proper manual focus lens. It has a very short throw too, only taking a quarter of a turn to get from the closest focus distance of 0.85m to infinity.

Lens Hood
As is the case with their new 70-200mm 2.8 OS, Sigma has included a 2-piece, petal shaped lens hood that bayonets together. If you are shooting with a DX sensor you are supposed to add the extension piece, thus offering more protection from extraneous light.

What happens when you add this piece is that the external length of the lens appears twice as long, compared to when the hood is not mounted. I tried shooting in FX mode using this hood extension and there is some significant vignetting of the corners, gradually decreasing as you stop the lens down to its minimum aperture of f/16, but still definitely apparent.

Without the lens hood it looks short and very chunky on my D700. With it on, it looks more like a 24-70mm 2.8 lens.

Autofocus Performance
If you search the web for consumer reviews of this lens you will encounter a fair amount of complaining about the inability of the lens to autofocus accurately, countered by a fair amount of people saying they have had not experienced the same thing. I’m one of those in the latter camp.

I have had the lens with me for about 2 months now and I have used it in a number of situations during that time. What I have found is that the autofocus is very responsive provided you’re focusing on something with a fair amount of contrast and you’re not using one of the focus points on the extremity of your camera’s auto-focus zone.

Something that critics of the AF fail to disclose when making their claims is exactly what camera they are using and in what situation they are shooting. Obviously if you’re in near pitch darkness and you’re trying to AF on a subject that doesn’t have a lot of discernable contrast with one of the outer focus points, you’re going to be met with the limits of your camera’s AF system. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the AF performance on this lens and I put it to a good test when photographing a corporate breakfast presentation in a very darkened hotel function room when I first received it. The results speak for themselves and were one of the reasons why I am now a big fan of 1.4 aperture lenses.

Some reviewers have said that the Sigma 85mm 1.4 HSM is faster than the new Nikon 85mm 1.4 AF-S. I can’t corroborate that because Nikon don’t send me their new lenses to try, but what I can say is that the Sigma’s AF is no slouch.

Image Quality

In a word? Great!

I use cameras to take images of real things and I expect my gear to deliver in areas where I need it to perform. This is the type of lens that you can use in a dimly lit room at its widest aperture and get pretty darn good results. If you shoot it at 1.4 you will be happy with the sharpness, but as I mentioned earlier, be forewarned about the limited depth of field. Don’t mistake out of focus areas of your photograph for optical softness – that’s bokeh, people! Choose your point of focus carefully and you will be rewarded with excellent sharpness (provided you’re not suffering from delirium tremors or some equally undesirable personal condition).

Bokeh
This is stunning mostly all the way down the aperture range and that’s really the greatest strong point of a lens like this. The subject isolation you get with it is complemented with smooth specular highlights in the background (see sample pics).

Fringing
Chromatic aberrations are there and you will need to deal with those, as you would with any other lens when shot at very wide apertures, but the fringing is not as bad as you would expect.

Colour
I found that this lens produces a very natural colour, which I suppose is to be expected if it's going to be used primarily as a portraiture lens. You don't want to be wrestling with colour balance when you're trying to reproduce exact skin tones.

Sharpness
Oh yes, this lens is plenty sharp. And then some. As I mentioned earlier on, shooting 85mm at a close range and at wide open apertures is kind of like a hit and miss affair because of the incredibly shallow depth of field you'll get from this lens. As an experiment I took a 30 centimetre steel ruler and lay it down on my floor, put my D700 on a tripod and began shooting the ruler at the main aperture stops, from f/1.4 to f/16, with an angle of about 45 degrees (see the image earlier in the review). Even at f/16 I couldn't get the whole ruler in sharp focus from end to end.

Obviously this depth of field increases as you approach infinity focus, so subjects that are not as close will fall into the sharp zone if you are practising the right shooting techniques.

Other Stuff
Distortion and other things that make you sit bolt upright in bed in the dead of night, clutching your chest and gasping for breath? Slightly darker corners in your frame? You might want to Google that – I don’t deliberately photograph brick walls or resolution charts on the wall. I just make pictures and pass comment on the things that really matter and I definitely didn't notice anything untoward in this regard that would make me shake my head or a stick at Sigma.

Page 3...

Overall Opinion

This is a great lens from Sigma, if you are comfortable with the working distances and limited d.o.f. As I said in the beginning of the review it is a specialist lens and depending on your typical application you might well find yourself using it a lot or a little of the time. For me it’s not a focal length I tend to use much, but on DX I would be a lot more comfortable with it. Where I see this lens really shining is in the darkened room shooting situation where you have sufficient contrast to acquire auto-focus.

Price-wise you are looking at $970 as opposed to the $1700 you’ll pay for the Nikon equivalent. $730 is a lot of extra change to cough up for a specialist lens that may or may not find itself being used all that often (professionally speaking). Your opinion may differ, of course, but $730 puts other stuff besides badge pride in my camera bag.

My verdict is to go for it if this focal length is something you like to shoot at. It’s a very good lens at a very good price.

Some sample images:

This one was shot at 1.4 in near darkness. The main light in the room was coming from the projector that was showing a presentation to this group of people, with a little bit also arriving from the breakfast buffet behind me.

Same location, this one shot at f/2.8

Here's an indication of the kind of smooth bokeh this lens offers. Shot at f/2.

This is a 100% crop of the above image. You can even see little strands of spider webs have been resolved. Also visible is some of the purple fringing, seen on the edges of the fern leaves. Not too bad.

Another image shot at f/1.4.

And the 100% crop of the in focus part.

What Bayer really means

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 07:06:25 +0000

I've written this to the best of my knowledge but I'm sure there are some inaccuracies in it; helpful suggestions for improvements (whether Scandinavian in origin or not) are welcome!

What a raw image really looks like

It is important to remember that the sensor sites ("pixels") can only distinguish tonality and not frequency of light. Hit the sensor with a certain amount of energy and it will read out a certain discrete value. It doesn't matter if that energy is a few photons of high intensity (blue light) or a whole bunch of lower intensity (red light)--energy is energy.

Here is a bayer filter for a 2k (46x46 pixel) sensor:

And here's the image we're trying to capture with it (after the image passed through our spotless low pass (anti aliassing) filter:

The bayer filter reduces the light for each pixel to either the red, green or blue band. After passing through the filter the image looks like this:

But remember, the sensor really doesn't care about colors, it only looks at energy levels in a single channel, like this:

At this point it's worth noticing that we only get a single readout per pixel, like this:

This (above) is what the raw file contains. Each of the RGB "pixels" contains a single gray-scale value. It's incorrect to see a mid-gray pixel value as RGB #777777 because there is no RGB, just grey values. At this point the sensor contains as much color information as Kodak T-MAX film, that is to say, none (yes, TMAX is more purplish than grey when developed but it doesn't contain information about the original color). Well, we do have some information about the colors since we know for each pixel what the corresponding bayer filter (R, G or B) is.

Now we run this data through our EXPEED, BIONZ or whatever fancy acronym processor in the camera, or through our beloved raw converter on the computer, and after a bit of witchcraft we get this:

Obviously, this image contains much more information than the previous one - 3 times as much, to be precise. I will leave it to the reader to ponder over this (hint: "Claude Shannon") and the relevancy of pixel peeping at that point.

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Editors comment:
Bart Willems is a New Jersey based amateur photographer who likes to share his knowledge, you might find his Blog worth a visit.

Ai-P Nikkor - CPU Chipped Manual Focus lenses

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:50:43 +0000

This is meant as an addition to the topic: Chipping a Nikkor: A walk-through

Ai-P lenses

Nikon have only implemented a CPU chip in three Manual Focus lenses;
45mm 2.8 Ai-P, 500mm Ai-P 4.0 and 1200-1700mm Ai-P 5.6-8.0

Many manual focus lenses don't have a equivalent Nikon Auto Focus lens; Fisheye-Nikkor 8mm 2.8 Ais, and Noct-Nikkor 58mm 1.2 Ais, Medical-Nikkor 120mm 4.0 Ais and a list of third party special lenses like the Voigtlander Macro APO Lanthar 125mm 2.5 Ais, lenses for IR and UV - The list is long,,,

The CPU in a Nikkor lens auto focus or manual focus contains the specific properties of that lens, it contains information to the camera to be used for calculating the exposure and general functions like auto focus, scene recognition, evaluating the return light from the pre flash and more.

The data contains: exit pupil size, maximum aperture, focal length, distance information, type of lens; MF/AF/AF-D/AF-I /AFS/AF-G/PC-E also information on calibrated auto focus characteristics such as in-focus point indication.

Cameras

F4
A dream camera for Ais lenses, since you can use Matrix metering. F4 will default to "A" if set to "P" or "S" and an Ai/Ais lens is attached. Same as the high-end DSLRs, in fact.

F5 and D1
The F5 the D1 series cameras; D1, D1H and D1X where crippled and the reason the CPU chipping of manual focus lenses escalated, they will only allow Colour Matrix metering when using lenses with a build in CPU.

The second scrolling wheel, used for setting the aperture value from the camera is responsible for this, the cost saving of omitting the aperture ring of the G type lenses prevailed backward compatibility.

F6 and D2
With the introduction of F6 and the D2 series cameras it was now possible to enter the data of 10 Ais/Ai lenses into the cameras menu thereby releasing the ability for 3D Colour Matrix metering.

However this only works if you remember to select the correct lens will this work, definitely still not a professional practical solution.

Teleconverters
When using the TC-E teleconverters the information on the properties of the lens and converter is relayed to the camera, sometimes the teleconverters miss inform the camera about the focal length but usually this is not so important for long focal lengths, since the scene usually is very compressed and at a great distance.
It is however very important up close, portraits and macro shooting.

CPU Chipping
Most manual focus lenses can be modified/upgraded with a CPU. The most important aspect is free space, is there room for the contact block, often you have to remove, grind material off, the mount and the rear lens group. Also the aperture linkage or parts of it must sometimes be repositioned to make room.

Donor lens CPU
A cheap solution, if you have access to scrapped lenses is to use a CPU print boards from similar AF lenses and implemented them into the manual focus lenses. For AF-D lenses and zoom lenses you will have to short out the circuit board at the appropriate zoom and distance setting, also the camera will think that it is a auto focus lens and sometimes even try to run the screw driver to achieve focus.

Custom CPU chip
Custom CPU and print boards have now been developed, several solutions has evolved;

The type of CPU chip that Bjørn Rørslett uses in the topic: Chipping a Nikkor: A walk-through can emulate the functionality of all types of lenses. Ais, Ai and Ai modified lenses can be used, as long as you set the aperture value via the aperture ring on the lens.

Even non coupled lenses, like the Macro-Nikkor lenses can be used for instance with CPU chipped extension rings and/or bellows. These custom print boards with CPU are so small that they fit inside a normal AFS contact block, truly a very flexible modular solution.

The other type is the "do all" Dandelion, a CPU and print board build into an ready to install contact block.

The block consist of two halves glued together around a print board with the CPU and with coil spring loaded contact pins. It is glued onto the mount using a supplied jig that holds the contact block, and if necessary a small distance piece, in place during the hardening of the glue.

After installation the CPU is programmed via a series of combinations of shutter and aperture settings performed with the camera. The Dandelion CPU can only emulate a manual focus G-Type lens, it has focus confirmation and will work in P, A, S, and M mode. You can't use the Dandelion for Ai or Ai modified lenses it will result in wrong exposures due to the non-linear movement of the aperture leaver.

The Dandelion is a very fragile design, easily damaged or knocked off by impact. These CPU's are similar in size to the 5 pin AF contact blocks, but without the lower part that rest against the inside of the F-mount.

This is written from memory, I could be wrong about some of the functionality, if you have any corrections please do not hesitate to post them and I will edit the post, thanks!

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Editor's Note: Erik Lund is from Denmark and is well known to the members on Nikongear.com for his technical wizardry in chipping and modifying lenses for use on modern Nikon DSLR's.

The Photograph That Wasn't

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:44:15 +0000

A while back I was in Austin, Texas for a short weekend of street shooting, bar hopping, and just having fun in general.  After a wild Saturday day and night on 6th Street, which consisted of me getting thrown out of a bar for taking photographs (a story for another time), I got up early on Sunday morning and hit the streets again.

This is my cure for a hangover- get your ass up, with head pounding, grab the cameras, and hit the streets.  However, this cure almost never works.  I left the hotel and made my way back to 6th Street.  It is about 8:00 a.m. and let me tell you, there is no deader place on the planet than 6th Street (the Party Capitol of Texas), than on a Sunday morning.  No one, and I mean no one was out and about.  I stumbled around a bit, found a coffee shop open and sat in there for about an hour consuming massive amounts of caffeine.  After getting a good buzz on and increasing  the pounding in my head, I once again made my way down 6th Street.  Still, there was very little activity until I heard the preacher long before I saw him.  Naturally I gravitated towards this booming presence and soon found myself face to face with a corner street preacher, preaching the gospel to anyone who would listen, which of course, was only me.

I instinctively raised my camera to take a shot, when he suddenly stopped, looked at me, shook his Bible and said in a thunderous voice, "I will smite thee ol' Satan if you take my picture."  He glared at me, and I did not take the shot.  I lowered the camera and he continued his sermon.  Again, I slowly started raising my camera and once again he stopped, looked at me, "I will smack you with my Bible if you take my picture Satan!!!"

I lowered my camera without taking a shot.  I wasn't particularly intimidated by him- I think I was more amused than anything else.  I thought, well, what will he do if I raise my camera one more time?  So, I started to slowly raise my camera and once again, he stopped preaching.  This time he violently shook his Bible and said, "God will strike you down Satan, if you take my picture."  I was just about to press the shutter when suddenly there was a huge BOOM!!!! He stopped preaching, I almost dropped my camera and pissed in my pants, and we both looked to our left, where a huge van had passed by and had backfired.  He smiled, I smiled, and I left without ever taking a shot.

I will always have this moment etched in my memory.  This is one time I did not need a photograph to remind me of how absurd and crazy life can be sometimes.  God I love photography.

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Editor's Notes: Rick Waldroup is our resident mentor in the Photojournalism & Street Photography forum. This is one of the most participated in boards of the forum.

Google Plus

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:36:08 +0000

There's been a lot of discussion and confusion about G+ since its recent limited launch, and it seems it is taking off like wildfire.  I've been using it for nearly a week, and while things started off slow, there's now an ocean of activity.  A few well known photog bloggers have embraced G+ and it's people like that who are driving the activity and inciting more friend-to-friend interaction with sharing and discussion.

It's true that many people won't shift from facebook, though I think anyone using that as their primary ammunition for shooting down G+ is sorely mistaken.  While both companies have top development engineers at their disposal, facebook can ever escape the stigma that it exists as a mingling place for people who aren't necessarily comfortable with mingling with one another.  While it has begun concentrating on making these interactions easier to manage, G+ has it now.  The other aspect that sets the two apart is that facebook will never enter the corporate world - most corporates go to great lengths to keep it out of their organisation as a time wasting activity.  G+ on the other hand has the potential to step right into the enterprise if some of the more popular suggestions are embraced and brought into fruition.  The most important of these is nested and shared circles.

With the separation of contacts into circles, it makes sense to be able to sub-group them.  This would actually provide a foundation for security 'levels' in an enterprise for access to shared information, as well as creating easily accessible layers contacts who you can communicate to quickly and easily.  Add to the mix an API (which I believe is on the cards) and you have a platform for enterprise-level development.  So, we have secure communication layers, document sharing areas and enterprise apps all alongside your personal groups of contacts.  Finally, using shared circles allows a group to quickly belong to another group.  In the sales sense, one of these circles could be a group of customers shared among sales staff.  Staff can click on any one of these customers and get a quick overview of recent communication before contacting them, or review that communication when taking a call from a customer.  Tie all this into Google Voice, and you have call logging with those customers as well.  Throw in a bit of API magic and walla, you have a full-blown CRM system on a familiar platform that is accessible via mobile.

An important aspect that allows all this to work (provided we actually get nested & shared circles and an API) is the fact that members of your 'circles' do not need to be members of G+!  Anyone who is not part of G+ becomes an email contact who can take part in a thread of communication purely over email without having to be told they need an account in a 'social network'.  People you follow do not need to follow you.  So you can keep up with your favourite photog blogger's posts on G+ without them having to worry about reading up about what you had for breakfast.

All this is actually steering toward the great holy grail of unified communication if google does it right.  Using this platform nullifies the need to use email because all your email contacts are neatly grouped in circles, and the comms are fed back & forth through the platform and automatically grouped so that you can quickly separate the type of communication you are taking part in.  My single email account gets subscriptions, personal email, web enquiries, notifications, the lot, and setting up filters to control it all is a pain.  In G+ your junk mail is subscribed to by way of a 'follow' dropped into a junk circle.  You have access to video chat, and likely soon Google Voice.  At google they have a lot more tricks up their sleeves that we haven't even thought of yet.  Facebook should be getting very worried by now; I think they have lost relevance overnight and already are starting to wither - especially when looking at the group-think that is across the internet.

We need to begin thinking past 'social networking' and more toward unified communication if we're to turn the internet into something truly useful.

Editor's note: Troy Simpson is a Charter Member of Nikongear.com and is based in Queensland, Australia.

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Nikon cameras in the cold

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:36:34 +0000

Introduction
Nikon DSLRs are generally specified with an operating temperature down to 0°C (32°F). Does that mean that they stop working and break below that temperature? No, it just means that Nikon (and others manufactures) are conservative in their specifications. There might be components inside that are only specified down to 0°C although they will keep working at lower temperatures, thus the whole device needs to be specified with that tolerance. So how low can they go in a practical situation, and what does the photographer need to care about?

Cold can affect the proper operation of a DSLR in a number of principal ways:
1)    Condensation problems
2)    Battery performance
3)    Mechanical /electronic issues
4)    Ability of the photographer to operate it in the cold

Read on to find out about each of them.

1) Condensation problems.
The ability of air to hold humidity varies with temperature; the warmer the air, the more water vapor it can hold on to. While relative humidity tells us how close the air is to being saturated, the dew point of the air is a much more useful variable for us here as it will tell how cold an object can be before humidity in the air may condensate on the object. Thus low temperature in itself is not what causes condensation, it is when a) our camera equipment is colder than the dew point of the atmosphere around it or b) that the inside surface of the equipment get colder than the dew point of the air contained within it.

a)    An example where surface condensation may form is a situation where the camera has been used outside so that its surface temperature has dropped to -20°C.  We then go inside a modern airtight house with bathrooms and perhaps a air humidifier to keep musical instruments healthy - dew point is as high as +5°C. Frost will then quickly build up on all outside surfaces of the equipment, and then melt as the equipment warms up. Another similar example is however the opposite situation: You live in an air conditioned house in coastal North Carolina. Inside temperature is a cool 18°C. Outside temperature is 35°C, nearly saturated, so dew point is up at 32°C. We go from inside to outside and condensation water will immediately form on the surface. The remedy in both cases is to let the gear acclimatize before exposure to the new environment. One often see Ziploc plastic bags recommended, however they will also prevent humidity that have been trapped, for instance snow on the camera, from escaping. Usually all that is needed to prevent condensation problems is just letting the camera warm up in the closed camera bag for a good while after coming from a cold to warm place.

b)    Condensation on inside surfaces of equipment could theoretically happen when going from a warm humid to a colder place. In practice temperature changes inside the camera happens slowly, and there is little air space and some humidity may have a chance to escape (weather sealed professional equipment being worse in this respect…). Thus signs of condensation inside will often be more of a sign that water has penetrated into the equipment at some point. The exception might be very humid warm tropical climates where desiccants will be your friend when storing the gear.

In general, condensation problems in a really cold climate like Fairbanks, Alaska where I live is much less of a problem than most think because the cold air has so little capacity to hold humidity and air inside buildings (sourced from the outside) is usually very, very dry. Most photographers traveling to cold places worry too much about condensation. And quite frankly, a little surface condensation on your DSLR is not likely to kill it, just wipe it off as soon as it melts and go on.

2) Battery performance in the cold is affected in two different ways.
a) The battery’s efficiency and thereby effective capacity decreases in the cold.  Bjørn (nfoto) did an excellent systematic test of ENEL3e Lithium-ion batteries in his D200 review ( http://www.naturfotograf.com, down on the main page), and found that they did not loose much capacity (about 15%) at -5°C, which is according to my own observations. Down below -20°C things are starting get a bit worse, but see below.

b)    The battery’s voltage output decreases when temperature drops. Even without being used the battery status will indicate lower and lower apparent charge when the battery is cooling, until it may finally show depleted and the body stops working. The Li-Ion batteries appear to be more strongly affected by this below –25°C, and when they reach -40°C they all appear dead. This is a reversible effect; re-warm the battery in your shirt pocket and it magically regains its apparent capacity.

So the remedy for battery problems in the cold is simple: always carry one or more spare Li-Ion batteries that are kept in a warm place near your body while the other battery is being used.
Another but expensive alternative in extreme cold is to use non-rechargeable Lithium AA batteries if your camera body can accept that. They have remarkable performance even at -40°C (lower specification).

3) Mechanical and electronic issues in the cold – how low can they go?
Living in interior Alaska where cold spells of -40°C are pretty common, one quickly learns that below a certain temperature, (typically -30°C), mechanical things are starting to act weird. So how do the Nikon bodies do at these more extreme temperatures? Do they work at all? As an example, during a long cold spell I set up a simple test: I left my different Nikon bodies outside at about -40°C for 9-10 hours. The bodies were my trusty F2 that participated in countless of winter camping trips in Norway without problems but never much below -30°C, my F4 with 4 non-rechargeable lithium batteries, my then 3 year old D200 and 1 year old D40x, both with fully charged warm batteries inserted before powering and trying to release the shutter. With the digital bodies and F4 the tests were repeated another night.

Here is a temperature record from data loggers at the test site, starting Dec. 29. The bar shows the period of testing with temperatures of about -40°C. The dark blue is outside temperature, and the light blue is temperature next to where I hid the cameras, a site which was somewhat temperature buffered. (Recording with the data logger started somewhat late and the first half of the recording is estimated from a recording station in a couple of miles away).

I expected that the mechanical F2, the F4 and possibly D200 would pass the test, but it was quite opposite. In all of these bodies, the mirror would not go all the way up, confirmed visually by releasing shutter without lens (holding breath…) and in the D200 also by the presence of scary frames like this (blockage is because the secondary mirror did not raise much):

It did not take much warm-up for the D200 to start to recover, and a little more warming (helped by lens pointing upwards), it was completely recovered. From this, my estimate is that the limit of the D200 when equilibrated to ambient temperature was between -30 to -35°C, which is in accordance with feedback I have got from other photographers regarding similar models.

The F4 powered up without battery change, and after warm-up the mirror started working normally again. The F2 locked completely up and could not be advanced again before the mirror was pushed up manually (and I discovered that after it had been several weeks in locked-up state…).

And then the surprise: D40x, the consumer model just kept on exposing frame after frame without a hitch. All it needed was to swap in a fresh warm battery, and it just kept going. I did repeat this test after two years on the D200 and the D40x at slightly higher temperature (-36°C) with the same results, so age was probably not an issue with these two, the F4 and F2 had not been serviced for about 20 years though…
D -40 xtreme ?

So what was going on here? With the reservation that there is only one sample tested of each camera and performance in extreme cold is often unpredictable, one thing that distinguishes the D40x from the others is that it is a simpler cheaper construction, and perhaps with less lubricant and more plastic used. Another difference might be the construction of the mirror mechanism. I believe the two film bodies and the D200 all use a spring loaded mirror opposed to the D40x which uses a motor, implied in an intervju with Kazunari Orii, Deputy Manager Nikon, http://imaging.nikon.com/history/scenes/26/index_02.htm :  “in Nikon's high-end models, we use a spring instead of a motor to raise the mirror.” Thus it is possible that the spring was not strong enough to overcome the increased friction at low temperature and raise the mirror all the way up, spring force being weakest at the top, while the motor would keep going until the mirror was raised.

The test result was surprising as I have used my D200 at -40°C a number of times before, and sometimes been out for hours in slightly less cold conditions and have not had any other problem than the need to feed it warm batteries. Why do I not see the problems in practical use as in the test? Let us look at a cooling curve in a typical situation in a padded case: I taped a thermocouple wire (a very small temperature sensor) to my D200, placed it in my Thinktank Digital Holster 20 out in the cold at an initial ambient temperature  of -41.7°C (thick horizontal line in graph below) and checked the D200 temperature with a digital readout now an then:

The cooling is quite slow; it took 2h to reach to two thirds of the final temperature. Extrapolating (it was late, I needed to sleep…), 4h total will probably only result in a temperature of -34°C which means that on most trips under these conditions the camera would never be equilibrated to ambient temperature. (4 hours at -41°C is a long time for photographer even with good clothing). Digital cameras may also be helped keeping warm when operating by heat production in electronic components like the display/sensor/processing board. Initial warming rate at room temperature of a cold camera in the bag (purple) was about the same as the initial cooling rate.

A further test with a D200 first equilibrated to room temperature and then exposed on a tripod at -38°C, using the timer to take one exposure every 5 min and occasional manual checks for low battery gave the following result: First battery lasted 40 min before it got too cold. Second battery (inserted after a 10 min lapse into the cold body) lasted 20min. With the third warm battery in, problems with the mirror started at 80 min (bottom of frame dark).

Other things that did not work: On both DSLRs the viewfinder LCD including focus brackets became almost unreadable (slow) after a night at -40°C; having programmed a center press on the multiselector of the D200 to center the focus point is very helpful. Top LCD was also extremely slow. Opposed to this the TFT based LCD on the back of both bodies was quite readable and just a bit slow. Having exposure data displayed there on the D40x was very useful. Both bodies recovered completely when rewarmed.

Lenses: The AFS 18-55mm (non-VR II) kit lens’ zoom mechanism completely jammed after moving it a tiny bit from 35mm toward 55mm! AF and MF worked reasonably well. So as a single focal length lens it is usable if zoom setting is decided beforehand… After warming up again everything worked as normal.
The focus on AIS lenses (28/2.8 AIS, 105/2.5 AIS, 105/4 AIS micro) got very stiff when equilibrated to about -40°C, but workable. Just do not expect to follow fast subject. On AF lenses (AF 20/2.8, AF 60/2.8 micro AF300 f/4) the manual focus did not get quite that stiff, and the AF worked on the D200 although slow. Aperture setting and depth of field preview on the camera with AF(S) and AIP lenses (28mm) worked, but aperture was difficult to read on the D200 top display and viewfinder displays. My AFS 12-24/4 has only seen a few hours at a time below -30°C, and has then worked without problems.

I contacted Rich at Alaska Camera Repair here in Fairbanks for comment. He gets lots of calls from worried photographers each winter who is coming up to cover the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. He was also surprised that the D40x did that well, and F2 did not do better. Old mechanical cameras are supposed to be very reliable; he said FM2 was one of the best in the cold. Graphite for winterizing cameras has not been used for a long time (would not want that in a digital body!). If winterizing is done it is more about removing lubrication at the cost of some extra wear. He also has some extremely thin oil. It did not sound like it is done often on digital SLR's these days as it is not needed much.

Could performance be improved by keeping the camera warm beneath clothing? Well, the body may release humidity into the clothing layers, and that could cause condensation, so it is probably not a good idea (in addition to problems with fitting a large DSLR under an anorak/jacket). There is however always exceptions: I have personally had no problems with keeping a compact camera in an inside pocket, and since it is kept fairly warm and is outside for short moments at a time there is little chance of condensation. It is usually the only way to keep those small batteries going. A photographer living in Point Barrow in Northern Alaska informed me that he kept his D3 warm beneath his parka without condensation problems. The parka is quite loose and allows dry air to circulate through it. (And people up there are usually getting around on a snow machine, not skiing which may cause more moisture release.)

4) Ability of the photographer to operate the DSLR in the cold.
Metal camera parts quickly conduct heat away from fingers and other body parts. During my cold testing above I once or twice forgot to put on my face mask before checking my D200 right outside my door. The result was a frost bite on the nose tip, so be warned! Cold fingers do of course not operate small camera controls well. To keep the circulation going in peripheral parts of the human body, it is essential to keep central parts warm enough so that our body will dump excess heat to the hands, feet and face. A trick I often use if I start exercising and cannot get the peripheral circulation going in spite of starting to get warm centrally is to stop exercising for a minute or so to allow priority of circulation to hands and feet over exercising muscles.

Small plastic camera bodies like D40x and lenses with plastic barrels have clear advantages when operated with bare hands in the cold as they conduct less heat. However a small camera body is difficult or impossible to operate with thick mittens (I often use 3 layer of wool inside a shell), which then has to come off. Many of the most essential functions on my D200 can be operated without taking the mittens off. Equipment like tripod legs can be insulated with foam or cork tape (I use the one designed for bicycle handlebars).

Surviving and being comfortable at -40°C is a matter of being prepared before going outside and have proper clothing (especially peripheral parts) and footwear. Just a small detail like not lashing the boots too tight can make the difference between warm and dangerously cold toes. There is also a factor of adaptation. After a cold spell at -50°C it feels very comfortable when it warms up to -40! Visitors from warmer areas that come up here during winter can feel a bit miserable because their skin is more sensitive to cold (read pain) in the beginning which causes constriction of blood vessels in the skin that makes it even worse. You can tell from the white face versus the red face of an Alaskan. Underneath a face mask though there can be almost tropical conditions. With all the clothes on it is so hard to move so that one barely needs a tripod :~). Getting comfortable with wearing all those clothes is an important part of the adaptation.

Actually the biggest problem with operating a camera in more extreme cold is the photographers own breathing. Frost deposits will easily block a clear view through the viewfinder eyepiece and cause fogging when it get to the front element/filter of the lens or ice fog from the breath drifts in the air in front of it. Some good control of breathing is called for. And although others may disagree, most of the times in the cold I prefer to have an NC filter on the lens from which I can wipe frost deposits or snow with means that are not optimal for cleaning a front element... If it gets too clogged, the filter can then be removed for another chance without filter.

5) Conclusions
I think the overall conclusion here is that Nikon DSLRs are surprisingly tough even in pretty extreme cold as long as the Li-ion batteries are swapped with warm ones. What limits the use of the camera in the cold is usually the photographer’s ability to stay warm enough to operate the equipment, see and make decisions rather than the equipment itself. Keeping the camera insulated in a bag when not used slows the cooling curve so that the apparent operating temperature is lower than static cold tests should indicate. Only for outdoor life like winter camping and expeditions in very cold regions or leaving it outside in a sled or deep frozen car during a cold spell would one expect the static limits of the DSLRs cold tolerance to come into effect. Down to -30°C professional models are even then probably not going to encounter problems, although things may slow down a bit. I am less sure about consumer models, more sloppy tolerances could possibly cause more variability between each single body; we need some more data to see if my D40x is just a very lucky one. I have gotten some different feedback on this matter. Data need to include information on both temperatures, duration, to what degree it was insulated in a bag and battery swaps. Cheap kit lenses may also potentially face problems that could partially spoil the party. If long term exposure to temperature below -30-35°C is expected, testing of specific equipment is recommended before critical use.

Opposed to this dry cold, wet-cold and stormy weather is expected to cause none of the issues seen during the deep freeze and will put other properties like weather sealing more to test. And finally: May be you should not tell Nikon you used your camera at -33°C when you send it in for warranty service…

For those who wonder what those low temperatures look like, here are some examples.

Caribou digging in the snow North of Brooks Range at about -40°C , D200, AF 300mm f/4. (Inversion layers forming in low areas can disturb long lens use, especially if you are just at the altitude of the transition layer and shoot though it) :

Frosty fur, Muskox at -43°C, F4 and AF 20mm f/2.8:

Animals still need to be fed when it drops below -40°C. Nikon F4 200mm f/4:

Ice fog over landscape at -50°C. Nikon F4, old scan:

Ice fog from human activity at -40°C, D40x 28mm f/2.8 AIS :

New years firework with ice fog at -40°C, D200 28mm f/2.8 AIS. Some watched it from their car…

All images copyright 1998-2009 Øivind Tøien

Comments on this article can be found in the original forum post.

Leaping Leopards

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:32:56 +0000

Whilst Sabi Sabi prides itself on our ability to find and view leopards in their most natural state, it is still a rare sighting. As we hit the winter solstice and the middle of our dry season, the bush is clearing out, making viewing all that much better and a little easier to view these elusive and magnificent creatures.

My goal for the afternoon safari was to find a leopard and the best way to start this process was to head to an area where the last leopard had been seen. Once in the area there are a number of things that will assist us with narrowing down our area such as finding fresh tracks or having the bush tell us where the cat is hiding or moving. Alarm calls from any of the antelope species, birds or even the territorial call of a male or female is often the best way to narrow the search.

Whilst on my way down towards bush lodge where two of our other rangers were busy following up on some fresh tracks we managed to find some fresh ones of our own. My tracker Solly and I jumped out of the vehicle to determine direction and then we hopped back in and moved to the next place where we should find tracks. Once we found the next tracks we followed them and then they miraculously disappeared. Again, we jumped out of the vehicle checking to see where the leopard may have left the road and checking nearby game paths for any further signs to follow. The next thing we heard was the rasping territorial call of a leopard and we quickly made our way towards where we had heard the call.

It was not long before we caught sight of the leopard just off the road. As we got closer we saw that it was a year and a half old cub with his mother a short way away from him. Now to find one leopard is awesome, but the sight of two is even better.

Stopping to have a look at the youngster posing on a tree we then heard growling from the female. Immediately Solly said that there was another leopard here and we left the little guy on his perch and we went to investigate. My initial thought was that it was probably a male that had come too close to the female and she was protecting her cub but when we got there we saw that it was another female.

The two ladies were having a territorial dispute and it was incredible to see this interaction. The boundary line was very clearly the road as they sat either side growling, tails twitching in irritation and periodically rasping their territorial call. Eventually to avoid confrontation the female with her cub left, but not without regularly checking over her shoulder to make sure the other female was not going to make a sneak attack.

The other female followed down the road not daring to set foot in the other female’s territory and making sure that her two nemeses were moving away. She kept calling to make sure the other female knew that she had lost and to warn her against stepping over the boundary in the future. The sight of the three leopards together was so much more than I could have expected before leaving on the game drive and it didn’t end there.

As the female and her cub left, the female's irritation now turned to the ageing cub. A leopard cub will usually stay with the mother for anything between 12 to 18 months. There have however been cases where cubs were completely independent by six months and others that stayed with their mother for longer than two years. This is very much dependent on the mother and in this female's case the cub's time had come. Every time he followed her or came close to her she snarled, growled and hissed at him. Eventually he got part of the message and let her walk off waiting a bit before he started following her again.

The separation won't be immediate but over the next few weeks he will get the message and have to look for a territory of his own.

Editor's Note: Richard De Gouveia is a professional game ranger at Sabi Sabi Private Reserve and is one of our preferred guides when we travel there on our Nikongear.com group safaris. You can read more about the safaris we offer here, and you can follow Richard's blog here.

A Look At The iPad2

Wed, 04 May 2011 09:24:46 +0000

Last year the original iPad was announced amidst a gaggle of journalistic giggles likening it to women's sanitary products. Despite this dubious name the product has fast become a legend and at the time of writing Apple literally cannot keep up with the demand for the latest incarnation, the iPad2. Even in the USA there is a 2 week waiting list in most major cities for customers wanting to get their hands on this baby.

With the recent official (and somewhat unexpected) release of the new iPad2 in South Africa I found myself driving to the iStore at a big shopping mall to the north of my city, thinking that I'd walk in and pick up the 16GB wi-fi version of the tablet, no sweat. Ha!

Getting One
I arrived there about 20 minutes before the shop was scheduled to open and already there was a queue of about 100 people waiting for the iStore doors to open. Crap. This wasn't expected because South Africans, specifically my fellow Durbanites, aren't known to be especially enthusiastic about product launches. Then again we did have to wait an entire year for the first iPad to "officially" make its way into stores here and that launch went down like a proverbial lead balloon amongst the local IT glitterati.

In the same massive mall, about half a kilometre away on the same floor (I'm not joking about the distance) is a general computer store that also sells Apple products, so I made my way there in the hope that they too would be sharing in this launch. As I arrived the store had just opened and there were about a dozen people crowding around a couple of trolleys as sales attendants were dishing out innocuous looking brown boxes. Must be iPads. I was right.

Once the initial flurry had died down I asked the sales guy if they had what I was looking for and his response was that he'd check the stockroom for me. A few minutes later I was standing in a much shorter line waiting to swipe my credit card for the iPad tucked under my arm. Cool bananas. I felt like I belonged to a higher world order!

With the bank's money duly re-assigned I walked back to the iStore, shopping in hand and ordered a cappuccino at the café just adjacent to it. The line was still there and the people in it were looking decidedly more miserable than before, especially since the shop was only letting in one person at a time. I was tempted, very tempted, to open up my brown box and take out the sealed iPad to see if I could make a quick buck by offering it to the highest bidder, but sanity prevailed and I decided to take a picture of the waiting wretches with my iPhone instead.

You can only see a portion of the U shaped line of people in this shot

Gloating and cappuccino both done I made my way home with my new toy and along the way decided to name it "Debbie", partly because I have had to go into debt to get it and partly because I have always wanted a girlfriend named Debbie. Expect a short series of How To articles entitled "Dallas Does Debbie" to emerge in the near future. For now though, I'll impart some of my initial findings.

Hooking Up
Back home I opened up the brown box and inside, nestled in a sexy, slim white box was Debbie (immediately I'm thinking of the old song "Be My Girl" by The Police - those of you who have heard it will know exactly what I'm on about!). As with everything Apple, packaging is very neat and minimalistic, so it wasn't long before I had her hooked up to the Mother Apple machine for registration and a software update. Update already? Yep, 660+ megabytes of it.

Shortly after the update I was free to begin exploring what exactly the big fuss with iPads is all about. As an iPhone user I am quite familiar with the many apps that are available for that device and I have about 40 of them installed on my phone. During the software update I had synced all of these to the iPad thinking that it would be a good place to begin. Problem. What I didn't know upfront is that the iPad and iPhone applications are not always compatible. Some of the apps I had installed were only designed for the iPhone and so when you're looking at them on an iPad, they have about the same screen size as your phone. There is a button to double the size of the app on your iPad screen, but trust me, it makes the app interface look crap. You don't want to do this. You want real apps that are designed for the iPad.

So I began again, with only the default apps in place and I started to see what versions of the apps I most liked on the iPhone were available for the iPad. Not that many, as it turns out, but there are indeed a great many very useful ones.

Handling
Much has been written about the supposedly improved ergonomics of the thinner iPad2 body. Generally what I have encountered is a lot of people saying how easy it is to hold now that it's thinner. Well, I don't have the experience of holding the older iPad, so I can't compare it with the new one, but what I can say is that I don't think the iPad2 is that ergonomic and easy to hold at all, especially in its naked form. I find that the aluminium back doesn't offer much grip when you have it in your hands or resting in your lap and it feels a bit susceptible to "dropsy". Maybe it's just me, but the next day I was back at the same store purchasing a leather folio from Belkin that it slips easily in and out of and which has a flip over cover, much like a book. This makes it much easier to hold, in my opinion. There is no way I am going to be easily convinced to part with the obscene amount of money being asked for the leather or polyurethane "smart cover" (which, for those interested, costs almost 3x what I paid for the Belkin folio).

Sound & Vision
The iPad2 speaker sounds pretty good on its own. It has a decent tone in the mid ranges and isn't tinny sounding like many small media devices are. I haven't tried listening with headphones yet (which incidentally are not included with the iPad2).

The screen is pretty decent. It isn't the retina display used in the iPhone4, but at a resolution of 1024x768 you're enjoying a decent enough picture to watch 4:3 movies on or look at photos with. Photos actually look stunning on the iPad2. A common complaint from would be users is that the device uses a glossy, reflective screen, which can make using it outdoors or in other bright places a bit unpleasant. Fortunately I don't mind the glossy screens, but I suppose they should offer a matt option too.

As with the iPhone if you're watching a video that is in 16:9 wide-screen you can get rid of the letterbox effect by tapping a stretch icon on the playback bar. I like that, but you do definitely notice the image quality deteriorate when its in use. I think this is probably because you're a lot closer to the pixels on the screen than you would be when watching a flat-screen television.

The Cameras
Now this is a complete mystery to me. Apple have placed a small camera in the front of the iPad2 which is supposedly used for Facetime, an application they developed for video calling between Apple users. Fair enough. They have also placed a 2MP camera on the back of the iPad2, supposedly for capturing stills and 720p HD video. Well, call me a Luddite, but what the hell would I want to use the iPad as a camera for? So that I can clamber around looking like Ansel Adams with his monolithic large format cameras? If there is a slight chance that this is what Apple were thinking, then surely they should have put something approaching a decent camera in the back then, because what we've got quality wise on iPad2 harkens me back to the days of the Sony Mavica digital camera that used 1.44" stiffy disks as storage! OK, not quite that bad, but if you consider just how good the camera in the iPhone4 is, it is decidedly disappointing.

Speaking of Facetime, I simply cannot get this app to work on my iPad2. All I get is an error message advising me that it cannot connect and that I should check my network settings. Did that. Still no joy. Works fine on the MacBook though. A Google search reveals that I am not the only person with this issue, but the solution I am being prescribed to follow involves changing the DNS settings on my wi-fi router. Uh-uh, I ain't going there. I'll just continue to use Skype on my MacBook and iPhone. Besides, who uses Facetime anyway?

So, why get an iPad?
Well, this is where I am going to stick my neck out and theorise on what I believe differentiates the iPad from its traditional computer counterparts and other tablet competitors, and also why it has been such a big success for Apple. And why you should get one.

If you consider personal computing and how far it's come in the last 10 years, you can appreciate that there are two kinds of things the average person is going to be doing on a computer: firstly they want to be able to produce stuff and secondly they want to have a little fun during their downtime.

The production side of things might involve writing documents, managing files, preparing presentations or spreadsheets, burning disks, editing photographs, etc. Generally stuff you do when you are sitting at a desk. The fun stuff involves watching movies, listening to music, browsing websites and playing games. Anyone who's ever tried to do the latter on a desktop or laptop computer knows that having fun at your desk isn't as cool as having fun while you're lounging about on the couch or spending a lazy day in bed. Sure, you can use your laptop for many of these things, but it's not all that comfortable, plus you have a limited battery life and also those things can get pretty hot underneath, especially if you're still only in your pyjamas. Trust me on this.

So what if you could use a little tablet to do the fun stuff and even some of the work related stuff, completely wirelessly? Sound good? That's where the iPad is a winner. It has the portability that gives you the freedom to move around your home or on a commute without the fuss that laptops bring with them, or the frustrations of small screens on cellphones. But it is NOT a replacement for the traditional computer and this is where all these other tech companies are going wrong.

Nearly every other day I'm seeing stories written about how this or that company has developed a tablet with a USB port, or an SD card slot, or a built in keyboard. They're probably great bits of hardware, but have those developers given a second thought to the need for those features in what is supposed to be a device intended to consume media, not create it? I don't think so. And this is why Apple are winning with the iPad. Not only have they created something very neat and cool that frees you from your desk or sitting in an upright position to surf the web (laptops and lying down just don't go together), but they have very cleverly made available a LOT of stuff for you to consume on your device through iTunes. Movies, music, books, games, magazines... What are the competitors offering? SD slots, USB ports and keyboards. Mmmm, real interesting.

Are you sold on it?
After a few hours of messing around with the iPad2 I wasn't convinced that it was worth the money, until I started exploring the different apps for things like news, music and other things that keep me amused. The discovery of the Pulse app has completely revolutionised the way I keep in touch with what interests me these days. You can add RSS feeds to a series of pages and skim over what's happening with a gentle finger swipe. Simply tapping the story takes you to a preview and then tapping the preview takes you to the site. Share it with your Facebook friends or your Twitter entourage using a couple of taps. I've even got a Nikongear.com RSS feed in there now. It works really well, showing the first image in a post as a preview.

By far the coolest thing for me about the iOS4 devices these days is the Airplay and iTunes home sharing features. I have an Apple TV device (no surprise there, huh?) and if I want to watch the video clips I come across on iOS apps like TED or Cool Hunting all I have to do is stream them to the ATV. They play effortlessly.

One of the reasons I got the small 16GB WiFi version of the iPad2 was because I don't really need a lot of storage space on it. I can't go cycling with it, so keeping music on it seems a bit of a waste of storage space to me. If I want to watch something on the iPad while I'm vegetating in my bed, or on the sofa I can stream it to the iPad from the shared iTunes library on my Mother Mac. If I should be on the road somewhere I can connect to the internet using the über cool personal hotspot feature of the iPhone4 and get 3G access, so no need for a sim card in the iPad. That's awesome just on its own. And of course I have the music I need on the iPhone anyway.

And for photographers?
The first thing that came into my mind when I saw an iPad for the first time was that it would be a great tool to show clients your portfolio on. And it is. Using the built in iPhoto app you can sync it with a folder on your Mac (or PC) and it will bring in whatever photos you have stored on there, together with any sub-folders. So, for instance, if I have done a speculative type shoot (I do them all the time) where you don't want to upload your images to the web for the client to pilfer, you can use this app to show them your selection of shots and if they are buying on a per-shot basis, your chances of increasing the amount of images sold is definitely heightened by using this approach.

There are also a bunch of tethering options to consider too. A while back I did a review of the OnOne DSLR Remote app for the iPhone (which sadly I still don't use very much), so I am curious to see how it fares with a nice big iPad screen. It would be very good for macro photography, I'm sure.

Spousal Replacement?
The iPad2 is kind of like the missing link between the desk, the TV, the phone and my ever-enlarging, unexercised butt. What do I need to go out for when I can control the world from my finger-tips, seated in my favourite chair? If Apple can teach this thing to do the ironing and laundry, plus deliver food to my stationary position, I think Debbie may very well be legalised polygamy!

Go get one (or two) from Amazon.com and support this website. Thanks for reading. :-)

Review: Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX OS

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:40:04 +0000

Introduction
  Here is a lens from Sigma that in its previous incarnations has come in for a fair amount of criticism from users, particularly regarding its sharpness. I've read several reports from users of the old versions of this lens and not many of them had very good things to say about it. The most common complaint was that the lens isn't sharp at wide apertures. So when I received a brand new Sigma 70-200mm 2.8 OS for use on our 2010 Sabi Sabi Safari I was curious to see how it fared.

   This is an all new design from Sigma. It comes with the HSM motor for super fast autofocus, as well as Sigma's Optical Stabiliser (OS) technology. Sigma claims that the OS allows you up to four stops extra hand-holdability (if there isn't such a word in existence I am laying claim to it now).

   Application
  The 70-200mm 2.8 lenses have become a staple requirement for many photographers, particularly in the reportage genre, although quality news photography appears to be fading faster than dial up internet connections. I use this lens mostly for stage photography and on occasion I might use it at events if I want to get some unposed close ups of people in crowds. It's not a lens to be used for group photography though, unless of course you're pretty far away and you're shooting small people. For wedding photographers it's a good one to use in the church. You can get sharp images in poor light at wide apertures and slow shutter speeds.

  Aesthetics & Handling
  At the time I got this lens I had just relieved myself of the older Nikon 80-200mm 2.8 AF-D, so I couldn't make any direct comparisons relating to the size, but going by memory the new Sigma is a bit thinner and longer than that Nikkor. It also has a much better hood as well as an easily removable tripod collar.

   The one thing that I like most of all about the aesthetics of the new lens is that it is for the most part sans that horrible matt paint that Sigma's EX range have been sporting in recent years (I've complained about that in previous Sigma reviews). The new lens barrel is made from some kind of  durable plastic, which makes the lens much lighter and less susceptible to cosmetic injury. You will still find the  matt paint on the tripod mount, zoom and manual focus rings though, which is pretty weird.

   Build quality is very decent. It's got the usual switches for AF/M focus, plus one for the OS, which like the Nikon lenses has two modes. I found the zoom and manual focus rings are very nicely damped and have a good feel to them.

   It feels good in the hand and appears to be perfectly weighted with the Nikon D700 body. I can easily remove the hinged tripod collar with one free hand and I don't have to remove the lens from the camera to do this. Interestingly this tripod collar is interchangeable with the one on the much bigger Sigma 120-300mm 2.8 EX.

   The hood supplied with the lens comes in two parts. It bayonets together to make a really long hood for use with DX sensors, or you can use the single part hood with FX bodies.

   As with every Sigma I have ever owned, you'll get a lovely nylon case to store in the box, in the top of your cupboard. :-)

   The Good
   In the past I have owned three versions of the Nikon 80-200mm 2.8 AF-D ED, plus the 70-200mm 2.8 VR1, as well as the Canon 70-200mm 2.8L (non-IS). I think this new Sigma is better than all of them. That's quite a claim because all of those lenses I mentioned have become quite legendary over a long period of time.

   Where the Sigma really shines is in the OS department. This is a very good optical stabiliser. I have been able to get razor sharp 200mm images shot hand-held at f/4 and 1/10sec. I could never do that with a non-stabilised lens. Of course you can always lug along a tripod or monopod if you want to use those old tech lenses. When I was on safari with the Nikongear.com gang last year I coupled the lens with the Sigma 2x teleconverter and was able to get many excellent shots without the use of any camera support. This lens works particularly well with that TC, retaining all functionality, so on an FX body you would have a 140-400mm f/5.6 optic with full Optical Stabilisation, which is pretty handy, considering you can shoot a D700/D3 at ISO 6400 and get away with it.

   On its own I couldn't ask for much more when I shoot it at f/4 (which is probably 99% of the time). If I am a fair distance from the subject I've got enough depth of field to isolate them, but still keep them dramatically sharp and yet throw even the busiest the background into an eye-pleasing mash of creamy pixels. This lens has a very unobtrusive bokeh with the OS switched off.

   The Bad
   On occasion I have picked up a bit of flare if I am pointing this lens directly into a strong light source. It's odd though, because if I change position just ever so slightly and shoot the same thing I lose the flare and everything is back to hunky-dorey again. I wonder if this doesn't perhaps have something to do with the position of the optical stabiliser at the time of the exposure? The flare is rare enough to make me think that this could be entirely possible, because as you can see from the image below, this is shot directly into the rising sun with no issues at all.

This image of the Durban skyline at sunrise is directly out of camera with zero editing. EXIF: D700, ISO 400, 185mm, f/4

I find that the auto focus, whilst very responsive, is just a little bit slower than what I am used to with similar lenses I have used in this zoom/aperture range. I'm talking a minuscule amount here, not something that should put you off the lens though. On my D700 it tracks focus very well, albeit a little noisily for a lens that is driven with an HSM motor.

The Ugly
   Nothing much to report on here, other than that I wish it had none of the weird matt paint at all.

   Conclusion
   If you're looking for a really good lens to use for environmental portraiture, stage work and anything else that you can fit between 70 and 200mm focal lengths, this is a lens you should look at. It's considerably cheaper than the Nikon VRII equivalent – I'm talking over $1000 cheaper – and I'll be honest with you, there is no way anyone can convince me that the Nikon is nearly twice as good as this lens.

   After spending time with it in Sabi Sabi in 2010 it has now become a big part of my professional set up.

We recommend buying this lens from Amazon.com

Here's a shot of a neighbour's rooftop (about 30-40m away from my window) shot at f/2.8 with the OS on. The Durban harbour is in the background.

Below is the 100% crop of the roof tiles. Again these images are straight out of the D700 with zero editing. D700, ISO 800.

My son is amusing himself with his skateboard while a Muslim looks on in wonder. D700, ISO 200, f/4

This is an example of hand-held results, shooting at 150mm and 1/10sec, indoors in poor light. See the 100% crop below.

Technical Data From Sigma Corporation here
If you have also used this lens, chime in with your own experiences here
Larger Sample Images

Focus Stacking Suggestions

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:19:28 +0000

Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind if you are serious about getting into stacking focus. I realize that most here already know this, but I offer it for those who are just getting started in focus stacking.

Best Aperture for Focus Stacking?

The best aperture is whatever is the sharpest aperture for the lens you have. You are not looking for depth-of-field here because that is what you will simulate by stacking focus, so don’t stack at f/11 or f/16 just because you may get more DOF. Go for the aperture where your lens is the sharpest, which is usually around f/4-5.6 for most lenses. Let the stacking give you the sense of greater depth-of-field.

Focal Length

You can stack with pretty much any lens, but keep in mind that the wider the focal length of the lens, the less you need to turn the focus ring for each layer. And most wider-angle lens do not have a long focus throw so just a tiny movement may be enough. If you are stacking with lenses that are 100mm or longer, a lens with a very long focus throw is a real help.

I routinely stack with lenses from 35mm to 200mm, most of them being macro lenses.

A Good Tripod

There are focus stackers who use no tripod, like as kids we would ride a bike and yell out “Look mom, no hands!” I don’t go there and if you want stacks of 6-10 or more layers, it for sure won’t work. Get a good tripod and ball head. Use them.

Fast Lenses

With focus stacking, especially in early morning or dim light you need a fast lens, not because you are shooting wide open but because you need enough light in the viewfinder to know where your key points of focus are. A lens of f/2.8 or faster is a real blessing in “magic” light of dawn and dusk.

Focus Increments

There is no set rule here but you want your increments short enough so that the overlap between shots (from the DOF your aperture is set to) is enough to merge well. Some shooters use a focus rail. I just use the focus ring but often move the ring just a tiny bit in each shot. This is something one has to get the hang of.

Focus Throw

A long focus throw while not useful in sports or action photography is very useful when stacking focus. I was surprised at how short the focus throw is on many fine lenses. If you have a lens you really love for focus stacking and it has a short focus throw, you may have to use a rail. The wonderful Coastal Optics 60mm f/4 APO lens has too short a focus throw for a 60mm macro IMO.

Watch the Light

This is more of a general photographic concern rather than limited to focus stacking. Pay attention to the light in your frame. If you have variable light, like a shaft of sunlight in a shady place, you may want to modify that shaft of light with a diffuser. I have thrown out more stacked photos because I could not nicely tone down hot spots where clipping occurred than for any other reason. Carry some small translucent diffusers with you and figure out some way (and it is difficult) to position them to filter the hot spots while you step through the focus stacking. The same goes for specular highlights (bright reflections). Tone them down in the field and don’t count on post-processing to be successful in removing or modifying them well.

Front to Back

Another very common mistake is to not catch the very tip of the front of your subject. You get back home and find a perfectly-stacked photo except that the front-most part is out of focus. It happens a lot. As a rule I back off until the whole thing is out-of-focus and creep up until just before the tip of the top of the front of the subject appears. I stack from there inward.

Extraneous Stuff

Another way to ruin a shot is to have too much room between the very front of your subject and the subject itself, like a blade of grass in the foreground or a stick, etc. If you can include the grass or stick in the composition (and resolve it), fine, but this is perhaps the most common way to produce large and un-fixable artifacts – a bridge too far. I remove or tie back whatever is intruding in my shot. Yes, Photoshop CS5 can remove extraneous objects pretty well, but so can you and perfectly.

Sensor Cleaning

Cleaning your sensor takes on another whole meaning when you focus stack. That spec of dust on a single-shot photo becomes a long line when 15-20 layers are stacked, a line not always easy to remove if it passes through part of your subject. They are nasty, so be ready to clean your sensor if you are around dust, which means: just get ready.

Touch-up

If you imagine that you won't have to touch-up your stacked photos, think it through. Focus stacking is a sampling technique like digital music, etc. By definition sampling means that something is left out. More often than not what is left out may cause unwanted artifacts in the final stacked photo. Plan to fix those if you want a finished looking photo. Focus stacking requires and teaches patience.

Focus Stacking Software

The focus stacking software I have found convenient are Zerene Stacker, Helicon Focus, and Photoshop CS5, and in that order. These all work more or less well.

Photoshop CS5 is a great improvement over CS4 but the program is still not ready for prime time as regards focus stacking and that is an understatement.

Both Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus work well and both are available in a demo version so I suggest you try them. I would not consider either the student or 32-bit versions from either company if you value your time. You want the 64-bit versions and that means their pro versions and they are more expensive. Of course if you have a 32-bit computer, you have no choice.

By all means get the 64-bit versions which are $289 from Zerene Stacker and $250 from Helicon Focus. I have tried and purchased both of these packages and have done (relatively speaking) a lot of focus stacking. Both companies have fine software.

That being said, my personal preference is very much with Zerene Stacker and I have a couple of reasons. One is that the retouch feature in Zerene Stacker is much better than that in Helicon Focus IMO. And retouch is the name of the game the deeper you go into stacking focus. Why?

The reason is simiple. Focus stacking is a sampling technique much like digital music CDs sample from an analog base. By definition all samples are just that, “samples,” and that means something is not sampled or left out. In the case of focus stacking what is left out tends to cause unwanted artifacts to appear that detract from and can ruin a stacked photo. So as much as I originally resisted retouching any stacked photo, over time I have accepted that it has to be done. After all most of us accept quite easily that we have to fiddle with white balance and other factors in post prepossessing. Retouching is the same idea. Therefore a very easy-to-use retouching method as in Zerene Stacker is worth a lot to me. It is really a brilliant solution.

My second reason is that the support and hand-holding from the Zerene Stacker staff is exemplary and I have been in the software business for a long time (second only to Microsoft on the Internet) and run a software company full-time. I am sure the other companies also have good support. You pretty much have to pay for Adobe support, so I won’t go there just now.

So take thirty days and check out some software and find out which brand you like.

Summary

There you have a few suggestions on focus stacking. I should add one more comment:

Patience and Exercise

Macro and close-up photography is a slow process, ideal for those of us who need to learn patience. If done well stacking photos can slow us down until we are forced to experience just the present moment. For many of us who are busy and think too much, this is a good thing and a respite, the best medicine I know.

It is also physically the perfect exercise for older folks. What else would possibly induce me to get up, get down, get up again, now get on my knees, now on my side, etc.? You could not pay me to get the exercise I naturally get when motivated by this or that wonderful shot. It is especially good for the abdomen, all the holding of the breath, keeping perfectly still, maintaining a pose, etc. This is all good.

Your thoughts?

I also have two books (2nd edition) on focus stacking that are free e-book downloads here:

http://macrostop.com/

Photo with Nikon D3s and Voightlander 125mm f/2.5 APO-Lanthar lens

[UV] A setup for easy close-ups

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:48:38 +0000

The UV-Nikkor 105 mm f/4.5 is of course one out of a very few "hot" UV-lenses in existence and an item keenly sought after. I'm fortunate enough to have several of them and thus can put them to good use on different cameras.

Whilst one cannot but admire the image quality delivered by the UV-Nikkor, there is a minor snag with its design. Namely, it is a "unit focusing" design only going to 1:2 on its own, any further and massive extension is needed. It shares this design with the 105/4 Micro-Nikkor and both can use the PN-11 to bring them to 1:1, but then the entire equipage becomes obscenely elongated and a little unwieldy to handle hand-held. Using the Coastal APO 60 mm demands much less extension to reach into the macro domain, but that lens has its own issues when focused close (hot spot can occur). So at least for close-up work I prefer my UV-Nikkors over the Coastal 60 (the latter, however, comes into its own for overviews, landscapes, multispectral applications, and so on, so having it is still worth while. Besides that, it's razor sharp).

I recently replaced the reflector on my Broncolor UV flash with a more suitable unit which effectively added almost 1.5 stops output for close-ups. So now, shooting UV at f/16 and ISO 100 is a breeze. However, due to the fact the new reflector is much wider (and shorter), using the camera hand-held is frequently much more convenient than earlier and for this purpose, the UV 105 is the better option. Now, how to reach high magnifications without all the extension and the annoyance of unwieldy size?

The following approaches are found to work well. A shorter M2/PK-13 ring gives almost 1:1 and is slightly easier to handle than the combination with PN-11. Reversing the lens and putting in on a short bellows will give around 1:1, and proved the bellows draw is moderate, this package can also be navigated hand-held. For true photomacrography, 1:1 and greater, I'm now using the lens in its normal position, and mount an EL-Nikkor 50/2.8 in front of the UV-Nikkor. This gives 1.5 to 2.5X and adding the M2/PK-13, brings the combination up to slightly above 4x.

So, by pocketing a few small accesories, my UV-Nikkor now works all the way from infinity to 4:1. Image quality is amazing all along the range of magnifications. When used with the 50/2.8 EL-Nikkor, "deep UV" response declines substantially, but for most uses of UV, flower details and suchlike, the UV response is more than sufficient.

Here are the items which I combine .... The extension rings, like the UV-Nikkors themselves, are of course CPU-modified. Note the 50/2.8 is mounted in the normal orientation using the 39mm threads of an BR-15 (Leica M39 to F) adapter, the latter clicks into a K3 inserted into the front threads of the UV-Nikkor. The master lens (UV 105) is set wide open and the aperture instead set on the EL-Nikkor to improve quality. Even better, at least when deployed on FX cameras, is reversing the EL-Nikkor, but for UV work with my DX cameras this isn't worth the added effort of attaching more step rings.

I'll post sample shots later when the spring has decided to stay permanently.

In case anyone wondered, the identical solution can be used for the 105 Micro-Nikkors. The EL-Nikkor suits the f/4 model the best, while the f/2.8 better can accomodate an AIS 50/1.8 Nikkor or SE 50/1.8, this time reversed.

Summer Wildlife (by Ranger Rich)

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:30:24 +0000

After all the rain this summer the bush is thick, green and fully in bloom. Flowers are out, trees are fruiting and all the animals are looking after their new born babies. We have had some amazing new additions to Sabi Sabi over the past few months which have provided some interesting photo opportunities.

Normally summer is associated with difficult times as we battle to find animals that easily disappear into the dense undergrowth but for the last 2 weeks we have been pumping. Our two lion cubs who are now approaching 4 months old have been out regularly and it is amazing to see how they have been growing. We have also had our first introduction to 3 new lion cubs, they are only 5 weeks old and I have been the only fortunate one to get a chance to view them properly. They are still being moved around by their mother in her mouth as they are too small to walk long distances. In a few more weeks they will be introduced to the rest of the pride and their 2 cousins.

Leopards have been out in abundance and our new dominant male, ‘M’, has been stamping his authority on the area. In the space of a day we watched him chasing away our old dominant male, Sandriver. By the wounds on his legs I could see that there must have been a momentous battle over territory before we saw them. This means that Sandriver’s two remaining offspring are in grave danger as the new male will not tolerate them and will attempt to kill them to bring their mothers back into oestrus.

This was proved later that day while we were on evening safari and ‘M’ came across one of the females with a cub…he went straight for the year old cub but his mother jumped in and furiously defended the little one, giving him just enough time to get away.

The next highlight of the last two weeks was watching ‘M’ hunting warthog and successfully catching one of the piglets.

The bush is alive with happenings at the moment. Birds are in full colour as the boys try to attract the ladies, there is an abundance of insects to watch and photograph and of course the flowers are just spectacular. The other gifts that summer gives us are incredible sunsets with the clouds providing the perfect canvas for the setting suns light.

That’s all for now…until my next bush update…

Ranger Rich

Join Richard De Gouveia & the Nikongear.com Safarians at Little Bush Camp, Sabi Sabi on our Ultimate Big 5 Safaris this year!