Tiefe Berge

"Tiefe Berge" • Nikon D70s with AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200/3.5-5.6G IF-ED

A view from the Aibleck across the mountains towards Tyrol. The ascend was quite exhausting on that hot summer day. The ridges in the backlight were toned in a very intensive blue that is typical for the border regions of the alps (humidity is higher than in the central alps).

This black & white conversion is the result of two independently developed exposures (one for the highlights, one for the shadows) from a single raw file which were combined with LR/Enfuse afterwards (this is very easy with Lightroom's "Create a virtual copy" function). Its another good example why shooting raw is a good idea: without a tripod, I wouldn't have been able to take more than one steady shot to capture more light and dynamic range. Shooting raw gave me the extra dynamic range that was needed really badly for this shot.

And nevertheless, I wonder what this shot might've looked like, had I taken it with a Fuji S5pro.

Active D-Lighting

Nikon's latest DSLR cameras have a new feature called "Active D-Lighting". Its present in the D60, D300, D700 and D3 at the moment (and since the D60 has it, I dare say that the successor of the D80 will also have it).

Active D-Lighting is supposed to help tame high contrast situations, helping to avoid washed out highlights and drowned shadows at the same time. Sounds great, doesn't it?

But how does it work? Simply put, its a combination of an automatic exposure compensation and the regular "D-Lighting" feature (that can be applied as an in-camera edit for quite a long time in various models). The camera automatically chooses a shorter exposure time to preserve the highlights, and then brings up the shadows a little bit with some tone curve adjustments. Its nothing that happens on the sensor level or some other nonsense.

You guessed right - Active D-Lighting is really a feature thats mostly aiming at the JPEG shooters. If you shoot raw (did I mention that you should?) all you get from ADL is the automatic exposure compensation - which might come in handy at times, of course (I shoot high contrast scenes after spot metering the brightest parts and trying to expose to the right as far as possible without blowing the highlights). If you're not using Nikon's own Capture NX software, you have to take care of the shadows afterwards yourself (the fact that ADL was used is embedded into the raw file and CNX can interpret it, other raw converters can't).

Its a step into the right direction and helps to create pictures that are closer to what we see with our own eyes. Blown out highlights and the limited dynamic range of the normal sensors are the key problem of digital photography (IMHO). But at the moment, the only technology that has a really big impact is Fuji's SuperCCD sensor (as used in the Finepix S5pro and other cameras). Active D-Lighting is no match for that.

Weissbach

A lot of work for a single picture... three exposures from the tripod, with a neutral density filter to get exposure times long enough to make the water flow, each exposure developed for its "sweet" part (shadows, mid tones, highlights) and then combined in Lightroom with LR/Enfuse (once more).

The scene is in the woods just below the source of the Weissbach, near Inzell in the bavarian alps. The sun was shining through the trees, and if you've been in the woods in such a situation, you know its impossible to catch the natural lighting of sunny spots/highlights and shadows at the same time in a single frame. Actually, the sunny parts in the image are too bright now, but compressing it all down into the midtones and occasional sparkles here and there seemed quite impossible without sacrificing other parts of the image and preserving a natural look.

PS: I've added the "making of" for this photo in a later post.

Contemplations on the crop factor (part 2)

Does the crop factor apply to aperture? Yes it does. The best example are compact cameras with their tiny sensors: unless your distance to focus is really really close, their depth of field is at infinity almost all the time.

But I'm not talking about compact cameras. I'm talking about DSLR cameras (and most of the time about Nikon), and of course the crop factor applies to the aperture on DSLRs, too. I think this is quite important, because the aperture is one of the two most important things that influences our photos (the other is, you bet, shutter speed).

Aperture defines the DOF aka depth of field (which also interacts with the distance to focus - the closer you focus, the smaller is the DOF, the farther away your focus point is, the larger is the DOF), and sometimes you want a very small DOF to isolate a certain subject. And this is where the crop factor limits you - the DOF is larger. You have to multiply the aperture just like you have to multiply the focal length. You can verify this yourself on http://www.dofmaster.com for example - just don't forget that you have to consider the crop factor (compare the DOF of a 50mm lens on a 1.5x crop factor camera with a 75mm lens on a full frame camera, or else it won't work).

What does that mean? The consumer grade telezoom lenses have a maximum aperture of 5.6 at the long end quite often - but with respect to the depth of field, its actually 5.6x1.5 (on APS-C). So you have an aperture that opens as wide as f/5.6, but it behaves like an aperture of f/8.4! This means that you can NOT isolate an object as good as you can with a full frame sensor. It also means that the very fast, more professional lenses (like the zooms with a constant aperture of 2.8 throughout the entire zoom range) are rendered into a mere f/4.2 lens.

In the end you have to realize: you can't operature any "old" legacy lenses like you expected when you're using a camera with a crop factor. Lenses are always the most expensive thing in the long run when you're using a DSLR camera, and especially on crop factor cameras, you need faster lenses. Faster means more light. More light means more glass, because focal length and aperture are connected. More glass means more weight - and more money...