The End

In the past 6 years, I used this blog to document my exploration of digital SLR photography, the knowledge I gained, and the experiences I made. Today, I have the feeling that there's not much left to say, and that what little still can be said would mostly be a repetition and refinement of what I already wrote. There's no need to turn in circles.

But despite the recent lack of updates, this blog still gets about 100-150 pageviews per day. I leave it like that as a resource for those who find the information useful, but I won't be updating it any more.

Since I also become increasingly fed up with Google and their arrogant slashing of services and buying/killing of companies that I like and use, I feel that I should contribute a little less to the kraken-like amassing of content on their servers, and do a little more of my own stuff. So that's the other "why."

I have removed all ads from the blog as well. The only one who ever got rich of them is Google. The web today needs more quality content and services that you can pay for, and less ad-financed stuff that is at the mercy of giants like Google. or Facebook. Use adblockers, folks. They make your web usage faster, and safer. Put your content where it is under your own control, and accessible to everyone, and not behind the pretty "social" walls of Google+ or Facebook. The internet wasn't meant to be that way.

The primary place where I publish my photos today is www.alex-kunz.com, a self-hosted Wordpress.org site with email subscriptions, RSS feeds and galleries. I share thoughts and (currently) travel logs and rants and such :) on my personal weblog at alexkunz.wordpress.com (moved away from Blogger for the same reason). So, you know where to find me. See you around!

Alexander
April 2013.

D800: the first 6 months

For the [tl;dr] folks: best camera I ever had. I see myself using the D800 for a very, very long time. For the first time, I have the feeling that the camera is not a limitation anymore (I've always utilized post processing more than anything else to bring out what I wanted to show). The D800 has excellent dynamic range and resolution, and highly useful high ISO (if you do it right, more of that below). You only need a faster computer, and more memory to process the raw files (but you need that every 2-4 years anyway).

A couple of the more noteworthy things, from my perspective:

Colors

D800 colors are different from every other Nikon camera that I've used. My D70s, my D700, Shuwen's D90 - they all had these typical "Nikon colors". I don't really know how to say it, but if you're a Nikon user you probably know what I mean. In particular, the greens always had a tendency to be somewhat yellow-ish. Throughout different raw-converters! And I never really liked "Nikon green" (it's a matter of taste, and I guess just as many people won't mind at all). The D800 gets rid of that, and I find the greens far better, which matters a lot in my landscape and nature photography. I can't really say that skin tones are any better or different, and if they are, that's most likely more because of white balance as far as I can see so far.

White Balance

It just shines. The D800's auto white balance is spot on far more often that the D700's, or even the S5pro's. Combined with the different metering/exposure/read-noise characteristics (<- three different links!) of the camera/sensor, I've abandoned using UniWB for maxing out on the "expose to the right" principle. The camera tends to expose a bit short in center weighed average metering (which is necessary to preserve highlights more than on the D700), and because of it's lower read-noise, that's not a problem (there's far more room for shadow recovery). Having accurate white balance is far more desirable IMHO, because of the nicer color rendition of the D800.

High ISO

Make no mistake: the high ISO performance of the D700 and D800 differ vastly. I've just been looking back at photos from my hikes in Germany in 2010 when I was using the Tamron 24-135mm with the bad light transmission (which forced me to go into the ISO1000-2000 range fairly often in the morning or evening hours, when I was using a polarizer), and there's just NO WAY that the D800 performs the same unless you size it down to the D700 resolution.

But what about the shiny DxOmark results? A lot of people overlook the fact that all DxOmark tests results are normalized to an 8 megapixel resolution, and that's how the D800 beats most other cameras even with regards to high ISO noise. But who buys a D800 to downsize the images to 8-12 megapixels?!

I've had great fun in Taiwan doing night/street photography with the camera set to Auto-ISO, all the way up to 6400, small or medium sized JPEG (make no mistake: the "small" JPEGs of the D800 are still 9 megapixels; medium sized JPEGs are 20 megapixels), black & white with red or green filter effect - and the photos look fabulous! Yes, they have a little grain, but compare it to film at ISO1600 and the camera is leagues ahead of it.

Dynamic Range

Yes, it rocks. I'm finally back in the "S5pro comfort" that I had gotten so used to, and the struggle I've always had with the D700, utilizing UniWB and whatnot, are over (I'm not using UniWB with the D800 anymore - see above, White Balance). The D800 is somewhat different because it has less exposure latitude in the highlights - it's still a bit odd that sometimes, the histograms in ACR/LR look good but there's actually already some highlight clipping going on but again, combined with the different metering, it's not a problem at all because I find that the camera does an amazing job at protecting the highlights, and together with center weighted average metering, the results are so predictable that it is easy to evaluate when things will go wrong, and just use a bit of exposure compensation.

The real power of the D800's dynamic range lies in the amount of recoverable shadow detail - it's so much that it is more a question of the software and your post processing skills to utilize the entire dynamic range that the camera offers (that said, I find Lightroom's process 2012 global Highlight/Shadow adjustments unsuitable to produce pleasant results very often, unfortunately, and use local adjustments or graduated filters in post far more often than I did in the past).

Depth of Field (hell)

Ok, this is the one downside of the 36 megapixel resolution. Things that simply used to be within the range of acceptable focus are not, anymore. I was able to get away with sloppy focusing (in terms of optimizing DOF) on the D700, but I really need to ramp up my technique with the D800. Every so often I find that some foreground or background area of a landscape photo is just slightly out of focus - it's not visible on screen of course, only when you zoom in. This needs work and I need to practice working this hyperfocal distance thing for real now. ;-)

We're newschool

The Silent Temple of Radiant Light

Has it ever occurred to you that what we digital photographers are doing is still all new, fresh, and often uncharted territory?

We have processes and tools that no one had only 5 years ago. Modern sensors capture a staggering amount of detail in the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows (see image above - a single exposure, developed from raw data in Lightroom 4 and Color Efex Pro 4). We can manipulate a color's hue, saturation and luminance with fine nuances, control over highlights and shadows are only a mouse click away, we can dodge and burn with some easy brush strokes, we can adjust our graduated filters in post and control not just the exposure, but saturation, clarity, color and a lot more with them. It's incredible.

The finer details of photography and developing one's one photos used to be a delicate darkroom science that required careful timing and handling of smelly chemicals. And how long was a landscape photographers formula "Fuji Velvia + ND-grad + Polarizer and be there" for a typical landscape photo?

Not anymore. Cameras have evolved, from devices that you attach a lens to and that hold some film, into precision instruments that are photon catchers par excellence. Releasing the shutter is not the end of the process today, but an interim step (perhaps only the beginning to some, actually).

Maybe we should just begin to fully embrace it, instead of trying to apply "old school rules" to a new school process, no?  And those who still judge the results by the tools involved should maybe get a little more enlightened, no? The audience doesn't care how much or how little work went into the creation of an artwork... it's only the photographers who get so obsessed about it. ;-)