Weird lens comparison (50€ vs. 500€)

A couple of days ago I bought a used AF 28-80/3.3-5.6G Nikkor - it was the first Nikon lens I ever used (on the D70 that I borrowed and which got me hooked on DSLRs) and looking at the old photos (from the JPEG days) I found the lens quite sharp... I bought it primarily because I wanted to have a "fallback" option in the form of an ultra lightweight standard zoom (OK, the focal range of 42-120mm on a 1.5x crop sensor is not exactly standard, but more like a portrait tele).

And sometimes we just have to do weird things. So I compared this (used, 50€) plastic lens (its plastic down to the lens mount, which I still find kinda scary) with my 18-200VR superzoom (used something like 400€, new "back then" about 700€) which makes me not quite as happy on the S5pro as it did on the D70/D70s - maybe that's because of the higher resolution of the Fuji, its stronger AA filter, whatever...

I made the comparison only in the focal range of the shorter lens (errrr, what else?), 28mm to 80mm. The 18-200 photos are not exactly the same focal length all the time because the zoom ring has no markers for 28mm and 80mm - I had to guess the position for these two and missed it by 1mm on the short end and 10mm on the long end - sorry.

I dated the lens test album back so it won't appear on top of my album list, but the photo dates are correct. Note: in the 1-up view, press the small loupe button in the top right corner above the image to get to a 1:1 view.

The photos are JPEGs straight out of the camera, scaled down to 6mpx, because thats what the Fuji sensor can resolve all the time. The camera was mounted on my tripod and placed about 80cm or something away from my CD rack. I used manual mirror prerelease ("M'up" mode) with about two seconds waiting before actually opening the shutter), released with cable remote - just to ensure that camera shake due to releasing the shutter and the mirror movement will be eliminated as good as possible. I only compared apertures 5.6/8/11 because everything else is not very important for me.

My personal conclusion: in the range of 28-50mm the cheap lens has more distortion, but its surprisingly sharp! At 80mm, the performance drop is quite noticable. Since 28-50mm is the zoom range that I'm most interested in (thinking of a combination of my wide angle with a yet-to-come telezoom here!), I think I'll try to leave the superzoom at home and save some weight when going on the next hiking trip. :-)

Lets close with a little trivia: Ken Rockwell writes in his article above (the link to the 28-80mm specs) that the lens was sold as a kit lens with film cameras - but here in Germany there was a short time (before the D70 was replaced by the D70s) where it was sold as a kit lens with the D70 (the black version, of course).

Row Sequence

As I'm working myself through the photos of 2008, adding keywords, rating, revising development etc. I came across a couple of "sequence" shots that I found rather attractive. Here's one of them.







Here, one of the features of modern cameras strikes back: automatic white balance. Each of these shots had a different white balance. Its not a problem to fix this when you're shooting raw, of course (and within certain limitations its possible to fix it in JPEGs, too). The photos are all set to a color temperature of 5000K, which is what color film used to have.

The perceived difference in color temperature in the photos is due to the different viewing angles - one is across the water all the way, the next one was towards the shoreline where the green of trees was reflected in the water. With auto white balance, shots #2 and #3 of the sequence where more uniform, but not more real.

And what you don't see is that the sequence really consists of something like 10 or 15 photos - it took some attempts until I had what I wanted. One of the benefits of digital photography: take as many photos as you like (and my usual plea: please resist the urge to show all of them to the public!:-)

Seasons Greetings

The western world celebrates the birth of Christ during these days (and what a coincidence its almost the same date as winter solstice, isn't it?;-) - so, a Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you.

During these last days of the year, its time to reflect, look back, and be grateful. Thanks to all of you who regularly visit my blog and/or web album and leave friendly comments and constructive criticism. In this global village of our web 2.0 world, you're the atmosphere that surrounds me.

Long Shadows

Long Shadows • Fuji S5pro, AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200mm

This photo was taken during the last hike onto the top of the Sonntagshorn - the fog was creeping into the the Heutal valley in the afternoon, and the trees casted their shadows into the fog that broke onto the hillside. I really wished for more focal length - to isolate the shadow of the trees even more and leave out the surrounding details.

The longer I focus on landscape photography, the clearer it gets that the "standard zoom" is not the primal lense for landscape photography. Most of the time, I either want to go very wide to grossly overdo the perspective perception (by placing an object right in front of the composition to anchor a grand scenery) - or move into the telephoto range to compress perspective and isolate single objects (the key to the old saying that photography is the art of leaving things away!). My current lens setup doesn't include a good telezoom yet. I terrible suffer from LBA (lens buying addiction)... ;-)

A good start into the next week, everyone. And don't let the pre-christmas stress and hectic catch you in full swing.

OT: The music is back

The weather is cruel and the days are short (but today is winter solstice, so the darkest days are over now). And short days and lousy weather are a good excuse for sitting in front of the computer all day long even on weekends.

But instead of sorting photos, describing them with keywords and whatnot (another task that I should finish), I worked on the online availability of my music. Ever since the 1oo% webpage disappeared from the internet, the songs were not completely available for downloading.

I took the extra work and encoded the original files anew, this time using MP3 (instead of Ogg Vorbis and MusePack, two music formats that I consider "dead" - not without regret I must add). For the moment I did that only for the tracks that were not available online and had to be uploaded to my own webspace anyway. I'll replace the other tracks sooner or later, too (except the oldest songs - I don't have the original WAV files anymore and I can't open the original files in Buzz anymore due to some incompatibilities with the machines or whatever...).

I've prepared a simple page (Google offers just the right kind of tools for HTML-no-brains like me) and collected the download links and some pieces of extra information. There should be more information about the songs, but I don't want to spend my time on complicated page design with tables and whatnot. :-P Some background info can be found in my other blog (the links leads directly to the Music category - these are all really old posts and they are in english).

Go to the music page and enjoy. Feedback is appreciated (as usual:-).

Cooling down

On the way to the "Dickkopf", Heutal near Unken, December • Fuji S5pro & Nikon AF-S VR DX Nikkor 18-200mm

OK, after venting off the anger about sensor dust & cleaning (that was really slowly boiling for quite a while now) a fresh photo to finish the day. A showcase for the S5pro's dynamic range, once more. Snow glistening in the sun, it was a wonderful day. The blue is all natural, post processing is at its minimum. More to follow!

Sensor Cleaning Mythbusting (Part 4)

So, I sold the D70s with the minor dust problem and got an all new Fuji S5pro. With a clean sensor, of course - how great is that? However... with the past year of digital photography, I grew more confident in exchanging lenses, swapping my 18-200VR superzoom with the 12-24 wideangle zoom more often, also utilizing the 50mm f/1.8 lens more often, etc.

Guess what - one sunny day I had a huge spot in my photos. It was a tiny hair, or something. I blew it away with my superduper rocket photo bellow, and it worked (I held the camera with the sensor pointing downward over a 150W lamp and blew in one streak of air with the below, and believe me, I saw that dust thing fall out of the mirror chamber). However... as I described before, the bellow blows in other, tinier dust particles... and one day, they start to show.

I already knew that wet cleaning isn't really much better than dry cleaning anyway, and I still found this "electrostatic charge" approach to be the right thing... it just had to be more professional than the "nylon brush & compressed air" attempts that already failed. So... I bought this wonderful device called "Arctic Butterfly". Its a nylon brush with a motor than will spin the brush real fast - you charge the brush that way, then turn off the motor and swipe the sensor with it. There's a video on YouTube showing someone cleaning a Nikon D3 sensor with it, it looks so simple! And there's an article at Luminous Landscape (a website that I value quite highly) which says that the Arctic Butterfly is good. I trusted them.

But guess what: IT AIN'T WORKING! I've swiped the damn sensor 5 times, following the instructions exactly, spinning the brush after each stroke, and after each attempt, there was still enough dust on my sensor that I could see. That motor driven brush is SUPER expensive (60€ for a plastic shit device, I'm sorry, but thats the truth) and its SUPER useless, too. I'm absolutely sure that the "charge something" stuff really doesn't work, no matter if its nylon brushes with compressed air or that wonder-gem called Arctic Butterfly.

Eat this: after using the Arctic Butterfly, I have dust particles on my sensor that I can see on the cameras tiny display when I use full magnification. I left it that way and reverted to dodge & burn in Lightroom. Screw sensor cleaning. You'll never get that thing perfectly clean once you've spotted the first dust particles.

Update: after writing this article, I kept trying the Arctic Butterfly because its the most convenient to carry around. My experience now is that you need just a LOT of swipes with the brush. Something like 20 works to remove fine dust particles that show up as small spots. So its like: spin the thing, make one swipe, then spin the thing, make the next swipe... and just do this very very often. For big particles, one single swipe might work.

To make myself clear: NONE of the cleaning techniques I've tried so far has worked. I've spent an ABSURD amount of money to remove things from my sensor that I cannot see with my own eyes, and it was NOT worth any penny of it. Its outrageous what a large amount of stupid things "they" want to sell you, and the amount of super-duper useless tips that float around the WWW is hilarious. And thats why I said that dust on the sensor is the single most annoying thing of digital SLR photography.

I guess I'm ready for disco film.

Sensor Cleaning Mythbusting (Part 3)

After the futile attempts of dry cleaning, I finally gave in to wet cleaning. I've read some clever blog posts that recommended very very very pure ethyl alcohol (or some other type, it seems like people can't make up their minds, one say ethyl, others say isopropyl alcohol is better) and cotton buds.

I went to the drugstore, and the first obstacle was the pure alcohol. They're not allowed to sell it in its very pure form. The best you can get here in Germany regularly is something like 90% - the rest is water, which leaves traces on the sensor when it evaporates, and thats not desirable. However, after explaining my problem, I got a very small amount (that will probably last for the next 50 years nevertheless) of 96% pure ethyl alcohol and proceeded with the sensor cleaning attempts.

The problem is the same as the one I already discovered with the nylon brushes: you can swipe the dust around, but you can NOT get it off the sensor. Wet cleaning with cleaning fluids may be good if you have some really nasty smear stain on the sensor, but it doesn't really work for removing simple dust. You'll end up with the dust on one side or corner of the sensor, and thats it.

At this point, I had enough. I filled in a form for Nikon's inspection service and sent the D70s off to Nikon's Munich service point for checking & cleaning - at the special price of about 50€ (plus shipping and stuff it ends up to be something like 70€) the sensor would be cleaned, but thats not all - the Nikon website lists a crazy amount of things they'd do, including AF adjustment, mirror and prism check, and whatnot. That sounded really good, so I gave away the camera for about 10 days.

When I got it back, I couldn't notice any difference regarding AF, mirror, prism, and whatnot. And the dust on the sensor? They, too, swiped it from one corner of the sensor to the other. So, that was another wasted 70€. I've reached the 100€ mark by now, and still no dust-free sensor. It wouldn't really show because the remaining dust was in one of the upper corners of the sensor, which means it appeared it was in the lower corners of the photo, and at normal apertures of f/8 to f/11, it wasn't really a problem.

Shortly after that, I got the Fuji S5pro, and with the confidence of the whole check & clean of the Nikon service point I sold the D70s as you may have read here in my blog. :-) But the sensor dust story doesn't end here, of course...

Sensor Cleaning Mythbusting (Part 2)

So, you have to get rid of the dust on your sensor. It happened to me, too. One day the amount of dust spots on the sensor of my Nikon D70s was simply too much. I had no idea what would follow.

For that very moment, I bought a Speck Grabber. I didn't know what to expect, but from the sheer look of it I thought that this might not work. The Speck Grabber is a tiny stick with an adhesive tip. There's no way to remove a single dust grainule with that thing without touching the surface of the sensor (or rather, the AA filter) and smearing it. This thing is a complete waste of money (and time). Don't even think about it, it the most superfluous thing in the world.

A common advice is to use a bellow. You can buy one of the expensive ones that are made especially for mad photo enthusiasts (with the craziest names, its really a "pimp my bellow" show), or you can go to the next drugstore and buy a clyster bellow (just make sure that they do not sell you one that has been treated with talcum powder or you'll be in BIG trouble). I'm a photo guy, I bought the photo guy version. The problem with the bellow is that it of course has to suck in the air on one end - if there are dust particles in the air around you (and they are), you'll blow them onto your sensor together with the air.

In the end, you might remove large dust particles like small hairs or something from the sensor with the bellow, but you'll also blow tiny dust particles onto the sensor. Trust me, it happens that way. I cannot recommend using this technique because most of the time, nothing is gained - if you have a large dust particle on your sensor, move the mirror to inspection position, hold the camera body so that the sensor points downward, and shake it rapidly. Large dust particles will fall out of the mirror chamber that way. And if they don't, and stick to the sensor surface because of their wicked nature, pumping air with more dust particles in it doesn't help solving the problem.

At that point, I was quite unhappy already, and I still hesitated to do a wet cleaning. So I went for the nylon brushes. "They" tell you that you can charge the nylon fibres with a bellow or compressed air so that it will attract dust. Blow the brush, one swipe across the sensor, blow the brush, another swipe, etc. etc. The problem: you can't keep that nylon brush clean for very long. You have to be very careful with the compressed air, too. Some of the cans do not only contain compressed air, and chances are you might smear your sensor with the secondary contents of the can. I found it hard to really produce that "charge". I swiped the dust into one corner of my D70s' sensor nicely, but I couldn't remove it from there. Conclusion: it ain't working.

At that point, I had spent something like 10€ for the Speck Grabber, something like 15€ for the bellow, and something like 20€ for nylon brushes and a can of compressed air. And the sensor was still dirty.

Sensor Cleaning Mythbusting (Part 1)

If I should name the one single most annoying nuisance of photography with a digital SLR camera, it is dust on the sensor. No doubt, no hesitation. Dust on the sensor is a problem (and to make a long story short, all the cleaning techniques I've tried so far are crap), and it annoys me to no end that it is completely unavoidable to go through this repeatedly.

How do you find out if you have dust on your sensor? You take a photo, and in an area that should be a plain blue sky or something, there's suddenly a slightly darker spot, very often round, with a soft border. Not a major problem because this can be removed easily with programs like Lightroom or Picasa (version 3, of course).

The dust will become more visible as you stop down the lens. Some lenses allow a maximum aperture of f/36, and the dust that is a slightly dark spot at f/11 will become a quite massive black chunk. Again, not a major problem because you shouldn't stop down that much anyway (because of the lack of sharpness caused by diffraction).

First: you shouldn't test your sensor for dust unless you have to, and the dust really cripples your photos. If you don't think you have a dust problem, don't start looking for it - it'll be there and cause you sorrow. :-) If you do have a dust problem and need to verify it you can test your sensor very easily: set a large aperture (in other words: tiny opening, like f/22 or something), set the focus to infinite, move close to a white area like a wall, or a piece of paper, and release the shutter. Then, inspect the photo.

So, as time goes by, the sensor will attract more and more dust. It just happens. No matter how fast you are changing your lenses - you open the mirror chamber of the camera, and you get dust in. As the mirror moves rapidly up and down to allow the light to reach the sensor, it will move the dust around, and some of it will settle on your sensor. And then some day, you spend half of the time for your normal post processing, and the other half for removing dust spots from your photos. Thats the point where you probably want to clean the sensor.

I'll cover some of the cleaning techniques and describe my experiences in the following post(s).

Observations in photo communities

Ever since I started getting more interested in photography, I (naturally) started to hang around in online photo communities. Some camera specific, some photo specific... and I want to share my observations of human nature :-) because there are a couple of things that seem to repeat, follow a pattern, depict certain specialities...

1. When you show a photo online, there's three types of comments: a) the unspecific "wow" type (Picasa Web Albums, flickr, etc. mostly) and b) the tech-headed "you got dust on your sensor and the chromatic abberation is really horrible" type and c) the wisecrack Mr Know-it-all that tells you how bad this and that is, how uninspired the shot is, etc. etc. (interesting enough, thats the type of person that most of the time shows none of his own photographs). Seldom, if ever, you get a comment that shows understanding AND constructive criticism. Conclusion: amateur communities yield amateur comments (yes, thats sad but true). So the question is: can I learn from these people? Perhaps, but not photography wise (at least most of the time - I'd better read a good book on photography)...
2. Some people seem to hang around in these communities all day long. They've posted 10k+ times and know a freaking amount of background and technical details. They provide test shows, tables, and whatnot. One question comes to mind: when do these people make "real" photos? And are they real?
   
3. There are members of these communities that have earned a certain credibility, and no matter what photo they show, they'll always get the cheering "wonderful!" comments from their fancrowd (even if their postprocessing is way over the top). Conclusion, maybe: don't make the mistake to say in public that a particular photo from one of these people is crap. :-)
   
4. Pissing contests. They happen all the time. That Nikon is better than this Canon. That new Nikon is better than that old Fuji. That new expensive Nikon I can't afford is not better than that cheaper Nikon I can afford and have. That Nikon that I haven't used is surely better than that Sony that I haven't used either. Conclusion: its better to NOT say what gear you're using, because people won't start nit-picking about noise and whatnot thats "typical for the xxxx model".
5. People do not understand the difference between a personal preference and artistic freedom. No one would say "I'd like to see that with less saturated colours" to Chris Coe (a photographer who shot mostly Velvia, a film with very rich colour saturation), yet in photography communities, you get these comments all of the time. Whats next? Someone saying "I'd like to see that without the polarizer" (or the graduated ND filter, or whatever). It seems that people cannot accept your post processing (or perhaps even pre-processing, or what should we call attaching a filter to the lens?) as artistic freedom and must utter their personal preferences of colour rendition and whatnot all the time - instead of focussing on the photo itself and offering helpful criticism. I mean... either you accept that a photo is not reality, or you don't.

Perhaps there's more, but this is the fruit from the cactus of knowledge for me so far. And lets not forget: these communities are good. There's always someone out there that has already used a certain type of gear in a certain context, and most of the time, there's also the few but extremely helpful and enlightened people that are making the stay worthwhile... :-)

Glow effect in Lightroom

In a recent post titled "soft focus hocus pocus" in the Inside Lightroom blog the author Brandon Oelling described how to create a (Picasa like) "glow" effect for portraits by using negative clarity and then a selective adjustment for the person.

I thought that this might work for landscapes, too, and tried to get an increased effect of the slight fog in the picture shown above (please ignore the lens flare). First I set the clarity in LR to -100, then I added a graduated filter in the top 2/3 of the photo with clarity +100 to return the trees to a normal appearance (of course it would've working the other way around, too, simply by dragging in the graduated filter from the bottom).

Making of: Weissbach

Sometimes, when both my girlfriend and me are on tour with the dog, my girlfriend takes her camera with her and unexpectedly makes photos of me - a funny documentary of my struggle with the camera. The above picture shows me with the D70s (on my Velbon Sherpa 750R tripod, with the Cokin ND4 filter attached), as I'm critically inspecting the shots on the tiny camera display that would eventually result in the photo shown in this older post. And Toni in front rounds up the composition. :-)

Beutelkopf

Peitlingkopf / Beutelkopf - Fuji S5pro, 18-200VR • I converted the photo to black & white because it wasn't very attractive in color (white snow, grey rocks, and the background in blue and gray).

This photo was taken on the last "normal" tour into the mountains for this year. On the 17th of November we "escaped" a thick layer of high fog and clouds that covered all of Burghausen and the Chiemgau region and hiked up to the highest peak of the Chiemgau alps, the Sonntagshorn, once more (it was my forth time on that peak). There was already a thin layer of snow but the climb towards the peak from the austrian side is all sunny and it was slippery not because of the snow, but because of the mud (quite a mess).

The photo shows the peak nowadays know as the "Peitingkopf" (with variations its also called "Peitingköpfl", "Peitlingkopf" and "Peitlingköpfl"). Just now I remembered a very old postcard that I once took home from the Heutal (from where the tour starts) during an earlier visit, and it also shows the Peitingkopf - except that the old postcard has a caption "Beutelkopf". Quite interesting. The name must have changed not too long ago. Maybe its a phonetic adaption, because the word "Beutel", pronounced in the austrian and bavarian dialect is more like "Beidl". A quick search for "Beutelkopf" did not reveal any hits that lead to this small neighbor-peak of the Sonntagshorn. It would be interesting to know the story of that name (as with so many other names of mountain peaks).

PS: the little peak appears in a lot of my photos, in my "Berge" album for example, here and here - funny that the other two photos are also black & white versions!

Nikon D3x samples

While I do not intend to turn my blog into a geeky gear announcement list, I found these sample photos, made with Nikon's new D3x camera, and I found them very very impressive (and thats nice photography, too) so I just had to share them. ;-) The file sizes of the JPEGs are under the thumbnails - be aware.