You may have heard that it snowed a lot on the Eastern seaboard the past couple days. The Washington Post is saying that DC got 25 inches or so, which sounds about right to me - when I stepped outside on Saturday morning, the snow came up to my knees, and there were still several hours of snowfall still to come at that point. On Friday night, I wandered around a bit with a few friends, shooting some typical documentary snow photos using only a Nikon 35/1.8 DX lens. I’ve heard that this lens works well on FX bodies with just a bit of vignetting. All the photos in this set shot with that lens (which is all but the last two) are totally uncropped so you can see how true or untrue that is.

I like how this lens works on my full-frame D700. Yes, there are limitations: it has to be shot wide open or the vignetting gets much worse, and the further away the focal point, the more pronounced the vignetting is as well. That said, when shot wide open with a close focus, the vignetting actually almost disappears. This isn’t evident in any of the photos in this set because I didn’t get really close to any subjects, unfortunately. Still, in a lot of cases the dark corners actually give kind of a cool, claustrophobic effect. (Not to mention that, in some applications like concert photography, they are often not even noticeable at all.)

Again, here’s a larger set of photos with this lens, from Friday night.

Some time ago I sent my D300 in because of the autofocus flakiness I’ve described in previous posts. I sent it in on Thursday, January 7th, got an estimate for the repair work on Thursday, January 14th, and got the camera back on Wednesday, January 20th. So just under two weeks’ turnaround, including shipping times. Not bad at all.

The repair was classified B2 - “moderate repair, major parts replaced.” This is what was done, according to the paperwork I received:

RPL BAYONET MOUNT
ADJ AUTO FOCUS OPERATION
CLN CCD
GENERAL CHECK & CLEAN
ADJ FLASH OPERATION
REPLACE RUBBER GRIP

Total came to just under $250. For that sum I have a D300 with theoretically fixed autofocus circuitry (nice), a brand-new lens mount (great), and a replacement for my well-worn rubber grip (cool, but I don’t care about cosmetics so whatever). Also, the camera came back safely and spiffily packaged, per the above. I haven’t actually had a chance to test it yet. But assuming all works well, this was a pretty good repair experience.

OK, this is just getting ridiculous. I guess Nikon knows its target audience for the new D3s - photojournalists and sports photogs who can actually use these insane ISO values. And concert photographers! Except concert photographers don’t make any money and so can’t afford this thing. I sure could have used a better ISO 12,800 (which the D3s can now do without the artificial “HI 1.0″ boosting) at some of the shows I covered recently.

More on those later, perhaps; for now, the headline photo is one of the best-looking ISO 6400 photos I’ve ever captured. St. Vincent at a very dim Black Cat. Below, one of the best-looking ISO 12800 photos I’ve ever captured… Bloody Panda at an even dimmer The Red & the Black (f/1.4, 1/25 sec).

If the D3s really has a stop better ISO performance than the D3/D700, I can’t wait to see what the next generation of sensor technology brings.

I would definitely get this instead of this. No question. Kind of crazy to think that you can get a nice used Nikon 400/2.8 AF-S VR (or three D700 bodies!) for the price of this little rangefinder camera. Of course, I’d still pick the M9.

Photo courtesy DPReview.

Cheaper (much cheaper!) alternatives for those looking for small, mirrorless cameras that produce great quality images: Leica X1, Epson R-D1, Panasonic GF1, Canon G11. Of course, none of these have the full-frame 35mm sensor that the M9 has.

EDIT: And, if I had another $10,000 I just HAD to spend, I’d get this to go with the M9. Ha.

I recently posted about slapping together a studio in my basement. This past weekend, I put it to use for the first time, with my friend Kate who agreed to be a guinea pig. Kate has done some completely amateur modeling before, but it was still a learning process for both of us.

I started off shooting on white seamless. I kept the background lit with two SB-600s (each on 1/8 power or so) for a nice high-key look. Many awkward shots resulted as Kate and I tried to work out proper posing techniques, but plenty of good shots came out of it as well. I was keeping things simple, using a single SB-800 to light Kate from camera left. The SB-800 was firing through a shoot-thru umbrella on about 1/16 power, and I also had a Lastolite reflector to camera right throwing a little bit of light back on the shadow side.

This lighting combo was working nicely, so I used it for several poses and outfits before moving the main light over to camera right for a (very) slightly different look. In retrospect, I wish I’d done some different things with the background light. I think I was getting a bit too much wrap, lowering contrast and casting some shadows on the floor that I didn’t want. (Faint reflections I wanted; shadows not as much.) I should have lowered the power on those strobes a bit, and for some shots, just to get a different look, I should have turned them off altogether. Ah, well… next time.

The below shot illustrates both the reflections/shadows issue and the wrap from the background issue:

After a while, we took down the seamless and went for a darker look. In the small confines of my basement I can’t get enough subject-background separation to get a white sheet to go black, so I cheated and hung a plain black bedsheet from my background support. Worked like a charm and I didn’t have to obsessively worry about feathering my light. With this setup in place, I decided to hit Kate from the sides at a really hard angle to emphasize her muscular build (she’s a martial artist). I did do a tiny bit of contrast adjustment in Photoshop - dodging/burning and high pass - but the following image is mostly a product of the light striking Kate almost directly from the sides. Both lights are at 1/128 power, one to camera left and slightly behind Kate and the other at camera right very slightly in front of her. In retrospect, I wish I’d used a touch of hair light as well to add some separation to the top of her head.

I wanted to get a little more interesting so we took down the background altogether, including the stand. I stuck Kate against the wall - an ugly, white-painted brick wall - and put my SB-800 on a lightstand outside the house. I set the SB-800 to its maximum 105mm zoom and stuck a grid spot on the front, then aimed it carefully through the basement window. We have a bush in front of that window that’s pretty, uh, bushy, so I had to make sure the flash was pointed just so to get through the foliage. Between the bush and the bars on the window I got a pretty interesting pattern to the light. Here’s what happened:

Then I set up an SB-600 inside, gelled it with a full cut of CTO, and set my white balance to tungsten. This made the SB-800 go blue and cast a warm light on Kate against the cool tones on the wall. That’s what’s going on in the headline photo. These were my favorite shots of the day and I really hope to be able to do some more stuff like this - kind of dark and edgy with a bit of urban decay feel to them. Here’s a wider shot that shows a bit more of the environment (check it out large for best effect):

After the jump, some quick gear talk about this new studio.

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Sorry, that’s me talking in marketing jargon. Above is a Drobo, which is sold as “the world’s first data storage robot” or some nonsense like that. It’s not a freaking robot. It’s a 4-bay hard drive enclosure that has a particularly clever RAID-like data striping/mirroring implementation built in. As far as I can tell it’s something like RAID 5, but it’s smart enough to be able to handle non-identical (in size, spec or brand) hard drives and changes its strategy based on the number and size of the drives it has to work with. Right now I have two 1.5 terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green drives installed in my Drobo, so basically all it’s doing (as far as I can tell) is a simple RAID 1 mirroring strategy. If I were to add a third or fourth drive, its strategy would change to something more sophisticated. The real amazing thing is that drives are hot-swappable while you work - as long as you have more than one drive installed, you can literally pull one out and still be able to access all your data with no interruption.

Installing and uninstalling drives is a snap, too - no cables to play with, just take a 3.5″ SATA hard drive and slide it into a slot. Bingo. The ease of use of this thing is amazing, and it’s nice to know that my photos are backed up on a secure device that can withstand the failure of a hard drive (but not two at once). I was running out of space for all my photos, and this seemed like a much easier, and ultimately cheaper, solution than building a file server or an external RAID array. What’s more, it’s easily expandable, as I still have two open bays and I can always swap out older, smaller drives with newer, larger ones. But I should be good to go for a year or so.

This thing is apparently very, very, very, very, very, very popular among photographers.

How well does it work? The above is shot at 17mm on my D700 using my Nikon 17-55/2.8 DX lens. Obviously, the image circle doesn’t cover the FX frame. No surprises there. I’ve been told that the Nikon 17-55 is usable on FX bodies (D3x, D3, D700) at 28mm onwards. I did a few very quick and unscientific test shots to see for myself. Results after the jump. You can click through to each photo on Flickr to view the full-size 12 megapixel image, if you really want to.

No lens hood and no filter mounted on the lens (using the hood results in much more severe vignetting). Settings: manual exposure at ISO 800, f/5.6, 1/40 sec. Manual white balance at 4,917 Kelvins. D2XMODE3 picture control. None of this stuff changed from shot to shot, the only thing I changed was the focal length. But, I didn’t use a tripod, and note that at f/5.6 the darkening in the corners will be slightly milder than if I had shot wide open at f/2.8. So take this all with a grain of salt.

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That’s right, I got myself a D700. Wide is wide again! Normal is normal again! Long is… uh, not quite as long again!

And, of course, the high ISO technology is cutting-edge. The above photo was shot at ISO 3200, underexposed, brought up about two-thirds of a stop in post (so effective ISO 5000), with high ISO noise reduction set to “low” and no other noise reduction done after the fact. The noise is definitely there, but the it’s mostly luminance noise, not a whole lot of chroma noise, and the pattern is actually pretty appealing, closer to film grain than any other digital noise signature I’ve seen. It looks a lot better in larger sizes - available at Flickr - than at the compressed, small version above.

Back in my pre-DSLR (and therefore pre-DX crop) days, my favorite lens was a Nikkor 24/2.0 AI-S. I absolutely loved the 24mm field of view, and the lens was fast, reasonably sharp, and built like a tank. After I got my first DSLR, if Nikon had made a 16mm DX prime I would have snapped it up in a second. After getting the D700, I slapped the trusty ol’ 24/2.0 on it and used it for my first real shots tonight. Felt like an old friend. On the other hand, a true 50mm is now something I’m a bit uncomfortable with; I don’t like it on DX, but on FX it now seems like this weird in-between to me, which is funny because for a long time all I had was an old 50/1.8 Series E lens handed down from my brother, and I loved it.

More to come, of course!

Warning: excessive geek-talk follows.

Ever since I started using Nikon Capture NX to process the 12+ megabyte RAW files from my D300, I’ve known that my camera equipment has outpaced my computer equipment. (Odd, since I have been a computer nerd since long before I became a photo nerd.) High ISO noise reduction in particular slowed my system to a crawl, making post-processing concert photos a much longer process than necessary. I’ve been wanting to upgrade my old version of Photoshop (7) as well, but have been afraid that my computer wouldn’t run anything newer than CS2 very well.

I’m using a machine I built myself five and a half years ago, so it’s definitely due for an upgrade. The big photography-related question was: what monitor to get? Currently I use a Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW, which is a 20″ widescreen LCD based on a high-quality S-IPS panel, and an old 15″ LCD that’s beginning to show signs of conking. I wanted like to get a new monitor to replace the 15-incher and still have a dual-monitor setup, and a bigger one with HDCP support would be great since my DVD drive replacement is a Blu-Ray compatible drive.

I tend to do lots of photo processing, lots of using Internet/e-mail/office apps, some movie watching, and a tiny bit of gaming, all of which require slightly different strengths in an LCD screen. Photo processing is the most demanding from a color reproduction standpoint, and S-IPS panels are the way to go for that. Trouble is, S-IPS panels are freakin’ expensive (we’re talking $1000+ for a good 24″ S-IPS panel). All the cheapest monitors are TN panels, which are 3-4 times cheaper than the S-IPS ones, and are great for gaming since they tend to have fast response rates, but poor at color reproduction and horrible in terms of viewing angles.

Realistically I had to settle for a PVA panel like that in the Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP or 2707WFP, which are newer and larger versions of my current monitor, and which are available at quite reasonable prices refurbished. After some back and forth I have decided to go with the 2707. I’m pretty psyched about it; 27″ is a lot of screen real estate for all those Photoshop toolbars and the like. I’ll get the monitor, as well as the rest of my upgrade parts, later this week. Woo!

Check out this Anandtech thread for tons of info on selecting LCD monitors - very helpful indeed.

One concern: I am upgrading to Windows Vista 64-bit, and I was a bit worried that the color calibration software that came with my Spyder2 device isn’t Vista 64 compatible. Luckily, I Googled and found this. Nice.

After the jump, the full details on what I’m upgrading from and to.

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Well, that ended up being pretty easy, initial delay aside. I dropped off my Nikon 17-55/2.8 lens for repair at Penn Camera at the beginning of November. I was told it would take a couple weeks for an estimate to come down the pike. It ended up taking almost a month for reasons unknown to me. After I approved the estimate - 10 days after it came in from Nikon to Penn Camera, because somehow I wasn’t notified and had to call to find out - it was only 10 more days before the repair was complete and the lens was back at Penn Camera for me to pick up. All told, exactly seven weeks’ wait, although if you subtract the 10-day delay that was Penn Camera’s fault instead of Nikon’s, the total wait was well within the 4-6 week range that I was told. Not bad.

The timeline looked like this:

• October 31 - I drop the lens about 4 feet. The impact embeds the AF contacts into the bayonet mount of the lens. Glass is fine but AF does not work.
• November 4 - I drop the lens off at Penn Camera for repair, am told it will take up to 2 weeks to get an estimate and up to 4-6 weeks total before I get the lens back, barring unforeseen delays involving parts shortages or whatnot.
• December 2 - Nikon finally gets an estimate in to Penn Camera. Penn Camera fails to notify me.
• December 12 - I call Penn Camera, they look up my ticket and find the estimate, and I approve it.
• December 23 - Penn Camera calls me to tell me the lens is back in their hands. I pick it up; it looks good. End of story.

The lens itself looks great - the above AF contacts were what had gotten bashed into the body of the lens by the impact when I dropped it on the sidewalk on Halloween night. Things that were done at the Nikon repair shop, according to my receipt, include “Replace bayonet mount unit,” “Repair Helicoid Assembly,” “Repair Aperture Ring Assembly,” and “General CLA to Specs.” Total cost? US $225 - far less than I had feared; I was braced for anything up to and above $500. Sweet!