Colorize (after/before)

I've got some catching up to do showing the after/before comparisons for the photos that made it into the SeenBy collection. Here's the one entitled "Colorize" that I uploaded on January 31st this year. (while the photo was actually made February 2010.)

"Colorize" // Fuji S5pro @ ISO160, 70-300mm VR lens @ 70mm, 1/15s @ f/8 (handheld)
Mouseover image shows the raw data as interpreted with the "ACR 4.4" camera profile and daylight white balance.

Shocked? :) I'm recently quite hooked on color alterations (that sometimes make Shuwen cringe) with the combination of the camera calibration, Lightroom's "HSL" panel, Split Toning and any combination thereof. The above photo has received tweaking in all three of these.

Please, developers: give us a choice

This is not really a photo related post, but since I'm using Google Buzz, Picasa Web Albums and Reader, I might as well share the daily annoyances that go along with them. Maybe I should add a new keyword "rant" and make this a regular feature of my blog? :) It's another post that could be filed under "I mean... someone's got to say it out loud, finally."

Annoyance #1: connection of Google Reader and Google Buzz

When you follow someone on Google Buzz, you're automatically following that person in Google Reader. If that person has Reader as a connected site in Buzz, you see their shares twice. In Buzz, and in Reader. Great.

Of course you can mute Reader posts in Buzz, all right - but that doesn't mute the shares in Reader itself (naturally, because both are stand-alone products - muting Twitter posts doesn't kill the posts on Twitter either.) So... if the person you wish to follow on Buzz is a "Reader mass sharer" they'll clutter your "People you follow" list in Reader. You have to go into that list manually (instead of simply browsing all unread items) and mark their shared items as read to leave you with a readable list of shares from people you want to see. It might be shocking indeed but yes, it does happen: I want to follow a person on Buzz, but I do not want to see their Reader shares.

But there's no way out of this: if you use Reader's "antisocial" flag, you're not seeing any shares. But what if you want to see Reader shares of a person who's not using Google Buzz, or does not have Reader as a connected site in Buzz?

(correction, thanks to Sven - see comment below: you can simply "hide" a person in Reader - doesn't change my point though that the two products shouldn't be connected since it's still another step that needs to be taken care of just because the products are connected.)

Please, developers: give us a choice. Let us follow people on Buzz without following them on Reader. Remove the connection of these two products. Injecting some faux "social" component into Reader is plain and simple nonsense (I'm sorry), and it doesn't make Reader a better product. Let Reader be a feed reader, and let Buzz be the social toy.

Annoyance #2: Picasa Web Albums in Buzz

I've buzzed about this before, and I also posted a warning in my Picasa Web Album, but it's still worth mentioning again because nothing has happened ever since: when you connect Picasa Web Albums to Buzz, it will turn PWA's sharing model upside down. Here's how:

1. create a private album (nothing happens in Buzz)
2. share it with someone via PWA's "share" button (nothing happens in Buzz)
3. add more photos to that album and...
4. a private Buzz post appears with the people whom you shared with as recipients
5. the recipients of the Buzz post can @ address other people (whom you did not share with!)
6. these other people will be added to the PWA's sharing list (getting notifications when you add new photos.)

In essence, you're not in control of who's seeing your private photos anymore - instead, your recipients are.

Granted, they could just as well pass on the private link to the album (if it's an "unlisted" album) or just show the photos to whomever they want (if it's a "login required" album), but since the problem that people want to "reset" the link of an unlisted album because someone passed it on pops up in the Picasa help forums repeatedly, it's a clear indicator that there's a demand for the feeling of staying in control over one's content that was marked as "not for public consumption."

I do use private and unlisted PWAs to share private photos from my "new life in San Diego" with my friends. And I could delete the corresponding Buzz posts immediately, right. But erm... if I'm on the road, or hiking, and share some snapshot from my smartphone, it's not exactly what I see myself doing every time.

But worst of all, when this feature was announced by the Picasa product manager Jonathan Sposato in his blogpost, there's not a single word about this (IMHO quite dramatic) change of control over your own content. Not exactly transparent, sensitive or user friendly. :(

Please, developers: give us a choice. Let us choose if we wish to connect our private and unlisted albums with Buzz.

NB: to avoid the problem, I removed my Picasa Web Albums from Buzz altogether, and replaced them with my photo stream from it's competitor: Flickr. Actually, that change has boosted my activity on Flickr quite a lot, which might not exactly be what Google wanted to happen. But that's the only choice I had.

Annoyance #3: Picasa Web Albums and the Google Profile URL

If you're using Google Buzz, you must have a Google Profile. For a short period of time, this profile was made a requirement to use the social components of Picasa Web Albums as well, but after a storm of protest, Google removed that requirement. (a quite striking example that, even if you're offering a free product, you still have to sell it to your customers. Welcome to the 21st century economy.)

I don't have a problem with the Google Profile, I actually like it. However, you can't have a custom URL for your profile (and thus, your Picasa Web Album - another rather useless connection if you ask me because at one time "back in history" we were able to set a custom URL for our web albums.)

That means you can either use the 21-digit numeric ID, or (if you're using GMail)... your GMail alias! Yes, that's right: you make your GMail address public if you don't want that endless row of digits as your profile and webalbum URL. Spammers ahoy, come grab my address, I'd like to get more emails!

If I want to direct someone to my PWA on their computer, I visit my blog and click on the link that I put there, because there's no way that I could memorize that darn 21-digit long ID - and there's also no way that I'm going to expose my email address to the public.

Please, developers: give us a choice. Let us have a custom URL that is both easy to remember and does not expose our private email address to the public.

I've been beta testing software voluntarily for more than 20 years in my spare time now, and there's one thing that connects all the products, all the services, everything I tried and used, and that is: the users are not left with a choice over what are - from a users perspective - rather simple configuration options.

It's not a major product design change to remove the connection between Reader and Buzz. It's not a major design change to only push updates to public web albums to Buzz. It's not a major design change to offer a custom URL for our profiles and web albums. And so on, and so on. It's just configuration options. They make a developers life a little more complicated, maybe. But they would add greatly to the user experience. Which one is more important?

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

Reasons to shoot raw II: Highlight Recovery

When I switched from the Fuji S5pro to the D700 last year, I suffered from the loss of dynamic range. This, and the problem that you never see what the raw data actually is like on the camera's display lead me to using UniWB for better exposure control, and most recently I began to trust Nikon's Matrix (pattern) metering more and more, and I'm utilizing the dynamic range reserves the D700 has in the shadows, too.

Matrix metering is actually pretty good (much better than I thought) at preserving the highlights when you're shooting raw. You just have to trust it, and be careful which AF sensor you're using.

But, on to the topic - highlight recovery from raw data. For the first example below, I've chosen a rather extreme overexposure. Or rather, what seems to be a rather extreme overexposure.

Original:


Edit: -3.00 exposure correction


In the -3.00 corrected photo, you can see that there's information lost in the brightest part of the image. It is noteworthy however that it is only the color information that has been lost - the luminance information is still there. A shot like this would be perfectly usable for a black & white conversion (if it was any good, that is.)

A more reasonable approach to that type of highlight recovery is to use graduated filters in post processing to bring down an over-exposed sky while keeping the foreground unaltered. I found that I can use this to correct the exposure by 1 or maybe 1.5 stops in post processing while retaining a somewhat natural look. It's not as powerful as using real filters (where up to three stop ND grads are commonly used) - but it's far more flexible, because I can very precisely control the filter strength, gradient, and even apply other effects like toning, clarity and whatnot to it.

Original:


Edit: -1.2 stops graduated filter applied over the sky.

Raw data interpreted with Lightroom's "Camera Vivid v2" profile.

Together with the technique of using an upside down graduated filter to recover shadow detail it is possible to bring the entire tonality covered in a single raw file closer together to a more natural look, or what the human eye could see, without using HDR at all.

Likes and Favorites

The two online photo sharing sites that I use both have features where visitors can show their appreciation one way or another besides leaving a comment: Picasa Web Albums has a "Like" button, Flickr has it's "Favorite" feature. But neither of the two are always fitting IMHO. And since all the web is about "social" right now, I might just as well explain what's wrong with them (at least for me) and add my two cents.

Picasa Web Albums' general "Like" button lacks additional features:

First, it's not "public", ie. you don't know who clicked it (unlike Buzz or Reader) - it's just a counter, without any real "social" value. And if Google wants to go "more social" like we always hear, this definitely needs to be addressed - because this is about my social circle. I often want to show my appreciation and tell a friend "I've been here and seen your photo, and I like it" - but the anonymous "Like" button defeats that very purpose.

Second, with the information of the "Like" button, one would expect that this data is utilized somehow - public statistics maybe, a "Highscore Table" that would serve as a "Best of Picasa Web Albums" or something like that. But there's nothing except "13 people like this photo." Too bad!

Third, a general "Like" button is not enough for me: I would really like to "collect" and keep personal favorites somehow (like this photo from Benoit Rousseau), and also show other users what those personal favorites of mine are, and browse other people's favorites. But there's no way to do that in Picasa Web Albums. :-/ (coming to think of it: in the Picasa software you can "star" a photo - why not in Picasa Web Albums?)

On Flickr, it's the other way around.

If I like a photo by someone on Flickr, it might not necessarily be a "Favorite" of mine. Favorite != Like. I'm hesitant to clickr the Favorite star all too often. Which leaves the comment feature to show my appreciation. And I don't know about you, but the "Well done!" and "Nice shot!" comments are simply boring*.

But the comments section below the photo on Flickr also serves as a kind of history with group invites and favorites (and unfortunately, also with a plethora of ugly, blinking, animated pest of badges, nominations and whatnot) for an item. It says "xyz has added this to his/her favorites" - which is clearly good enough if I don't have anything to say or would just repeat what someone else has already said, anyway. Best of all: it's possible to BROWSE the Favorites stream of any user (here are mine.) Flickr also gives me a "Popular / Interesting" list of my photos. I don't know how exactly it is generated, but at least they are using the statistical data and do something with it.

Conclusion?

Ideally, we would have BOTH. Just like on YouTube! Their "Like" button is anonymous (and I'm not sure if the "dislike" button is something that would fit a photo sharing site), but they do have a separate "Favorite" feature. That's better. Unfortunately, I share photos, not videos. :P

And I think that for photos on the social web, neither of the two features should be anonymous. But ideally, that would be configurable - much like I can set my follower/following lists and likes/comments on Google Buzz to private or public.

Got that off of my chest. I feel better now. I mean - someone has to say it, right? :)

*) talking about comments, I try to at least name what I like about a photo instead of putting "Nice" or some other rather meaningless speech bubble. Identifying what's appealing about a photo also helps your own photography! Think about the photo. (and yes I know, there ARE photos where you simply want to say "wow!" or "how beautiful" - that's OK.)

Meditation

I wanted to add some examples on my take that a macro lens should be stabilized. Being free to move around adds a lot to the "experience" of making macros - personally, I really consider it a form of meditation. An interesting subject can completely absorb me and I lose all feeling of time and space when I approach something like the Agave in the following photos (I already showed them in my Picasa Web Album and on Flickr.)

"Agave Study 1/3" // Nikon D700 @ ISO3600, 1/200s at f/16 (105mm VR Micro Nikkor)


"Agave Study 2/3" // Nikon D700 @ ISO5000, 1/200s at f/16 (105mm VR Micro Nikkor)


"Agave Study 3/3" // Nikon D700 @ ISO6400, 1/200s at f/36 (105mm VR Micro Nikkor)

Needless to say that these three "picks" are just a fraction of the photos that I made of the plant. With bracketing and trying different apertures I made a total of 24 photos and spent something like 15 minutes studying the plant with my macro lens.

Organizing Photos (Steps 5 and 6)

After the bothersome task of keywording the photos (and I admit it, I'm often too lazy to do it propperly for all of the photos - what I do try is to at least apply good keywords to all of the photos that I marked as "Pick" as I described in Step 2, often just before exporting/publishing to the web.) there's not that much left to do.

The next step in organizing my photos is the rating. At this point a friendly note: always stay consistent with your organization. If you use the Pick flag for the "keepers" you should always do so. You could also use the Pick flag to mark the photos meant for showing to the public in a Picasa Web Album, on Flickr, or some place like that. Or use it for something entirely different. It's up to you! Just keep it consistent. It might not sound so important right now, but in the long run it helps a lot if you clearly defined how YOU use these features. Which brings us to...

Rating (Step 5)

This is actually fairly simple (or is it?) and the most important thing is that, once decided, follow your own definitions. Make up your mind what the ratings actually mean to YOU. Lightroom has ratings from 1 to 5 stars for each photo, and you can quickly apply them by just pressing 1 2 3 4 5 on your keyboard (which is far easier than the bug-ridden rating stars that can be clicked and sometimes get "stuck" somehow, resulting in CTRL-Z orgies.)

My personal definition of the star ratings is:

• 1 star - personal memory, for my own private collection only (this would contain photos of Shuwen for which I wouldn't get a model release, to say so, or the blurry photos of Toni that I keep because it's a fun memory, etc.)
• 2 stars - personal memory, could possibly be shared with friends and family (in a slideshow that lasts the whole evening and into the night - grin) in context.
• 3 stars - a nice photo, but not particularly outstanding and of a more documentary character. To be shown in context with other photos (example: an entire album of a hike, or something.)
• 4 stars - definitely worth showing to the general public (ie. Flickr or PicasaWeb), stands well on it's own even without context.
• 5 stars - the best of the best. Totally worth printing, hanging on a wall, and admiring every day. :)

Together with the pick flag and rating I can now get a selection that I upload to the web. I filter for the pick flag and photos that are rated at least with 4 stars and I have a good selection.

Labels (Step 6)

Using the color labels is not part of my regular workflow, and I do that for a reason: to break my rule of staying consistent. :) I use the color labels for temporary organisation tasks on selections that I made otherwise with the help of the flags, keywords and ratings. The usage of color labels 

Examples:

I'm using smart collections for the "Best Of" selections per year (they contain the photos that I made within a whole year, which are marked as pick, and have a 5 star rating - of course I could do just the same with library filter). When I selected the photos for 2010's Top 10 posting I applied a color label to these 10 photos and set a filter that would only show me the photos that do not have a color label yet. With the filter bar in LR I could switch back and forth between the selection and unselected photos quickly.

Or I'm using color labels to mark "red", like "warning" (because they contain people and it could be a problem to show these to the public, say because I don't have a model release, or because my friends don't want that, or because it's a nice photo but has some technical flaw like a slight blurriness, lens flare, etc.). That sort of thing.

And that's it. 

Reasons to shoot raw I: Black & White conversions

There are a couple of good reasons to shoot raw (and a couple of good reasons to shoot JPEG too of course.) It all depends what you want to achieve. I'm not going to open that can of worms, these discussions are all over the internet.

Instead, I want to show "things you can't do with a JPEG" - I did that waaaaaay back then (here and here) when I started blogging and using raw data (hey, those old examples might be bad, but they're not that bad I hope), and it's time to revive that topic because "a picture speaks more than a thousand words."

Software has changed. Back then, when I switched to using raw and started posting my first raw vs. JPEG examples, I was using Rawshooter Essentials (RIP) to develop the raw data, and Picasa to organize my photos. Nowadays I'm using Lightroom, and ACR has a new "2010" process version that extracts more detail, and Adobe keeps updating the camera profiles so they'll get better and better. [And I also hope that my post processing skills have improved. :)]

So - one of the reasons to use raw data are black & white conversions. Lightroom's HSL panel turns into a black & white mixer when you switch processing to monochrome, and you can do some really insane tweaking with it (see screenshot). Raw data has more bit depth than JPEG. This allows really strong black and white edits with the B & W mixer panel in Lightroom. Edits that go far beyond a simple desaturation.

Below is a photo from my hike on the "Kleine Reib'm" last year in September. It was 10am and the later summer morning sun was creating a situation of strong contrast and long shadows as a very good foundation for a strong black & white conversion. As usual, I offer this as an after/before comparison with a mouse-over image.

"Fagstein / Steinernes Meer" // Nikon D700 @ ISO360, 24-135mm lens @ 36mm, 1/60s @ f/8
Mouseover image shows the original raw data processed with the "Camera Standard v3" profile in Lightroom and daylight white balance.
Click on the image to view larger in a Lightbox.

I want to post at least two more articles on reasons to shoot raw - one to illustrate highlight recovery, one to illustrate salvaging shadow detail. Stay tuned! :)

Organizing Photos (Step 4)

In the first article of this little mini-series I described how I organise my folder structure, and how I pre-sort photos from a freshly imported batch with Lightroom. That's all done fairly quickly, because a good amount of all that is done by Lightroom for me. Things begin to take a little more time from there on. The first part also spawned a lively discussion on Google Buzz (which you may or may not want to follow) that led to some additions (after I first published the original post.)

Before I continue, I just want to repeat what I stated in the first post: it all depends a lot on personal preferences, and in this post I just want to share how I do certain things in my workflow. It's just a description, I'm not trying to sell my way of dealing with it as the ultimate truth. There are other ways to organize photos that work just as well, I'm pretty sure about that. But maybe there's something in here for someone out there that's useful.

Let's say that, by now, I've gone through all the photos that I imported with Lightroom (that was step 1), wed out the failures (step 2), arranged bracketed exposures and series into stacks (step 3) and thus only have the "keepers" in my Lightroom catalog now. It's time for...

Keywording (Step 4)

I think this is one of the most important things to do if you want to build a digital archive that you can actually search and enjoy even after years. But it's hard to give a good advice on how much or how little keywording is useful, because it depends so much on the individual usage.

What I describe in the following paragraphs might sound like a lot of work, especially with the nested keywords and stuff. Well, it's not that bad, actually. My "keyword collection" grew over time, just like my photo collection. :) Needless to say that, as the keyword collection grew, there was some point where it became a real mess. Scrolling through it in Lightroom required quite some mouse navigation skills. :P

So I began to group them into categories. I created a nested keyword structure that consisted only of very few "main categories" so the list would be easy to navigate and maintain. When I enter new keywords I don't think about that structure most of the time - I just enter the keyword. Every now and then I check my keyword list and put the new fellas into the category they belong to. Because I only have very few main categories, that's a rather easy task.

In Lightroom, you enter keywords in the Library module. To create nested keywords you type "keyword > group" and it will create "group" with a containing "keyword". To edit a keyword, you double click it in the keywords list. To move a keyword in our out of a category, you drag and drop it. I think it's not really necessary to go into more details - it's all covered in the online manual's section "Working with keywords".

I tried to create abstracts from the categories that I personally use so that the following list is more like "general idea" for you.

1. Describing the actual content of the photo

These are the keywords that describe what's actually in the photo. I keep them apart in some subcategories:

• all things that are alive: people, animals, plants. These contain sub-categories of course. "Animals" contains "Dogs" for example, and dogs contains "Toni" quite obviously. "Plants" contains "Flowers" and if I'm able to identify a flower it might contain "Liverleaf"
• all inanimate objects (I just call them "things"): cars, buildings, sunglasses, bottles, etc. etc.
• everything that I call "elements": water, sand, rocks, snow, wind, fog, pebbles, river, slope, mountain, sun, moon... now this is clearly something that applies very much to my landscape and nature photography. A street photographer might omit these completely, maybe.

2. Describing activity, state, mood, expression, event

The keywords in this category are the answers to questions like

• what are they doing? Swimming, walking, jumping...
• what is it like? Wet, dry, colorful, empty, full, green, striped... this could also include an identification of the dominant design element, like color, lines, patterns, geometry, and so on.
• what is the emotional "quality" and feeling of the photo? Happy, sad, peaceful, silent, spacious, busy...
• what was the occasion during which the photo was taken? Party, meeting, Christmas, car show, trade fair...

3. Describing technical aspects

These keywords describe technical aspects of the photo, but not the content. Examples would be macro, close-up, panorama, color or monochrome, landscape or portrait format, abstract, blurred, panning, and so on, and so on...

4. Location information

• General descriptors such as indoor, outdoor, urban, rural, alpine, beach
• City and country: New York, USA, Kazakhstan (here, nested keywords are really helpful: if I add "san diego" to one of my photos it will automatically contain the keywords "california" and "usa" when I export)
• Sub-locations: Lake Hodges, Frillensee, Downtown...

5. Placement of the photo in time

• Time of the day: morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, dawn, sunset
• Season: winter, spring, summer, autumn
• The month the photo was taken

6. Helpers

I'm using keywords for other organisational tasks, like tagging photos that I uploaded to Imagekind or published here in my weblog.

And that's it.

Now, some of you might argue that a couple of the examples are also available in the EXIF data, or there are separate IPTC fields for them (like the location). I can very well filter photos for their orientation/aspect ratio in Lightroom - so why would I add a keyword for that? The reason is simple: Export and organisation, especially to and in the web.

Keywords are searchable easily on online photo hosting services like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. IPTC and EXIF... not so much. That's why I create keywords even when I have EXIF and IPTC data fields that contain the same information.

A simple example: I have a digital photo frame, and it's set up on a shelf in landscape orientation. That thing is connected to my Flickr photostream - but not the entire photostream, only the set that contains the photos in landscape orientation, and that Flickr set is maintained with SuprSetr. And SuprSetr can automatically maintain sets by keywords, of course. So what I do is to set a filter in Lightroom for the Aspect Ratio "Landscape", select all photos and tag them with "landscape format".

Pitfalls

After using nested keywords for a while (you create them in LR typing "keyword > group", or by dragging one keyword in the list on top of the other) I noticed a pitfall: do not mix different types of keywords in a single nested structure.

Above, I already put down "Lake Hodges" as an example of a keyword that describes the location. But Lake Hodges is also a body of water, and could as such also be a sub-keyword of my keyword category "Water" (and the "Lake" keyword that is in there). So where should it go? Water / Lake / Lake Hodges? Or Location / USA / California / San Diego / Lake Hodges?

Personally, I think it belongs to the location category. Lake Hodges is a place, and if I'd make a photo of a rabbit hopping on the hills that surround the lake, that photo was still taken at Lake Hodges, even if there might be no water in the photo. Had I put "Lake Hodges" as a subkeyword to the "Water" category, Lightroom would also export the keyword "Water" and "Lake", which would be confusing since there's neither of them in the photo.

But that's just MY take on it. If you prefer it the other way around, that's fine. I'm just trying to say: make sure to stay consistent with the scheme you choose.

You might also want to take care of which of the keywords should or should NOT be exported. By default, a keyword in Lightroom will export. Now, my "People" category contains the names of the persons who are in the photo - and when I export those, I do not want the names of the persons to be in the keywords. So I deselected "Export containing keywords" checkbox for my "People" category.

Other general considerations

• the language: English is more universal, especially on the web, but your native language may be easier for you to handle (because you don't have to look up all the things in a dictionary)
• singular or plural: put down "bird" even if it's a flock, or "birds" even if it's just one? I use plural: if it's one bird, I keyword "birds" and "one" (number, see above) - because I can search for that very precisely later (yes, some might consider that overkill:-)
• synonyms for keywords could be used to add a second language, to add singular if you're using plural, and of course to add actual synonyms (like common English names together with the scientific name of a flower or plant)

Stay tuned for Step 5 - Ratings and Labels. It will be shorter, I promise. :D

5x 50mm

At the moment, we have five lenses in our household that all cover 50mm. :P I wanted to sell the 50mm/1.8D (my fellow Buzz followers remember that) since we also have the 50mm/1.4D - which is not just three times more expensive, but also a little faster, has a much more pleasing bokeh, and of a little more solid build quality too. So it should be the better choice, right?

After a review by John Caz where he stated that the 1.8 version is actually better than the 1.4 when used in the range of f/4 to f/16 (in other words: better for my landscape and outdoor photography) I got curious and made a little comparison.

The camera was set to Aperture priority mode, ISO200, on the tripod, and set to manual mirror release (MUP). After releasing the mirror with a cable I waited for ~3 seconds before I released the shutter (with the cable again, of course).

The test subject is my CD rack once more, and I focussed dead center (just below the top of the two CD spines of "Insekt - Stress" and "The Infinity Project - Mystical Experiences".)

The raw files were processed in Lightroom with daylight white balance (5333K), the "Camera Neutral v2" profile, and Adobe's own Lightroom sharpening preset "Sharpening - Narrow Edges (Scenic)" (which means sharpening 40, radius 0.8, detail 35, mask 0).

The lenses I used are:

1. AF-D 50mm/1.8 Nikkor (f/2.8 through f/8)
2. AF-D 50mm/1.4 Nikkor (f/2.8 through f/8)
3. AF 28-80mm/3.3-5.6 Zoom Nikkor (f/4.5 through f8 with f/4.5 being the largest opening at 50mm)
4. Tamron 24-135/3.5-5.6 Zoom (my "hiking lens"; f/4.5 through f8 with f/4.5 being the largest opening at 50mm)
5. AF-S DX 16-85mm/3.5-5.6 VR Zoom Nikkor (just out of more curiosity; f/5.6 and f/8 only since it's largest opening at 50mm is f/5, which I skipped; VR was turned off on the tripod)

Instead of creating numerous 1:1 crops and stuff, here's a Picasa Web Album that contains all of the photos in full resolution. You can use the new zoom feature to go all the way in to a 1:1 view and drag the image anywhere you want. Those are 12 megapixel photos, they may take a moment to load depending on the speed of your internet connection.

The first set (at f/2.8) only contains two photos made with lenses #1 and #2 (the 50mm primes), the other lenses don't open up that wide. The second set (at f/4 and f/4.5) is 4 photos of lenses #1-4 (see note for lens #5 above), the third set (at f/5.6) and the forth set (at f/8) contain all lenses #1-#5. It's not a defect that lens #5 shows this extreme amount of vignetting, it's a DX lens and at no point of the zoom range does it cover the entire FX sensor of the D700. As I said, I just included it out of curiosity.

Other than the center of the image, have a look at the extreme top right corner, there's a CD in a cloth wrapping (that's Field Rotation's "Licht & Schatten" by the way, a tightly limited edition of only 100 copies worldwide was released) which is an excellent subject for evaluating the detail.

Slightly to the left of the center is a CD with a very broad digipak spine: Hecq's "Steeltongued". The white letters on the dark purple spine give a very good contrast for evaluating the sharpness in the center.

Findings: no real surprises but...

1. wow, what piece of crap is the Tamron? I bought it used, but that looks like money that was not very well spent, right? The top left corner is horrible "wide open" and looks like the thing is de-centered, or something. Things are better at f/8, but the amount of distortion is insane. Also, it requires exposure times that are twice as long (!) as those of the Nikkor lenses in these conditions. It must have a horrible transmission (T-value, only very few lens tests include it). I better dump that thing soon... :P
2. look at the $45 user 28-80mm lens, and how it compares to the $600 16-85mm at f/5.6 and f/8... good heavens, the cheapo zoom is so much better than the VR lens... :-/
3. The 50mm 1.8 really is great when stopped down, my personal winner for the intended use with landscapes and nature. Look at the extreme corners at f/8. Unbelievable! That's a $120 lens!

Other than that, I leave the interpretation up to you.

PS: lens #1 is about $120, #2 about $300, #3 was about $45 used, for #4 I paid about $200 used, and #5 is about $600.

Into The Great Wide Open

I'm still working on the next post for the "Organizing Photos" series (describing Step 4, my keywording), so in the meantime, here's an After/Before comparison for one of the images that made it to SeenBy lately, just as promised (the photo is also part of my Top 10 photos from 2010.)

As usual (I hope, by now:-) the image changes when you move your mouse pointer over it. The mouseover version is the photo directly from the camera with a daylight white balance of 5333K applied, and the raw data interpreted with the "Adobe Standard v2" profile.

"Into The Great Wide Open" // Nikon D700 @ ISO200; Sigma 12-24mm lens @ 12mm, 1/50s @ f/16.

The Sigma 12-24mm is a unique lens - at 12mm it's the widest non-fisheye lens that I know of - it's a full frame lens, and not just for the smaller crop sensors. However, I must admit that it's usability is somewhat limited. The zoom range ends at 24mm - which still is pretty wide, so I don't leave that thing on the camera once I made that wide angle shot I was thinking about. With it's protruding front element and the built-in hood it's not possible to use filters, at least not when using the lens on a full frame camera. It's possible with crop sensor cameras (because the lens-cap is two parted and has an 82mm filter thread.)

Therefore, the lens doesn't make it into my camera bag very often. I think I might trade it in for the 16-35/4VR Nikkor. I mean... 16mm with VR? How cool is that? And with the "long" end of the zoom range at 35mm it's much more useful, and I might not have to swap lenses all that often.