Now how do you use this damn thing?

 Humor, Photography, Techy Stuff  12 Responses »
Jan 082010
 

PDL_20100107_0265.jpg

Evening Flight

Standing calmly near the edge of the Ashley River, waiting with eager anticipation as the sun began to drop below the horizon, I mounted my D300 on the tripod, framed up the scene before me and then a thought occurred to me. I’ve not used auto bracketing in a long, long, time. As the contrast was fairly high, I figured that this would be a good thing to do. Later, I could come back home and combine a couple of exposures using Photoshop and have a nice looking image.

For some reason, my mind would only bring up memories of how to do it on my D2X, which I sold more than a year ago. I hunted through the various menus and could not remember how to do it. Damn! I always carry my book with me, but I never want to waste time when the sun is sinking trying to thumb through a book and figure something out!

All of my simplifying left me a bit clueless. Suddenly, I started laughing out loud and thinking to myself: Dufus! What would you do if you had a film camera that didn’t have all of that cool technology in it? Of course, I’d change it to manual and kick it old school, which is exactly what I did.

Sometimes that guy behind the camera is so funny! What a knucklehead! Of course, when I got home, one of the first things that I did, while the photos were being copied to the computer, was look to see how to do bracketing. Maybe I’ll be ready the next time, assuming that it isn’t too long between those times.

Oddly enough, there were a few of the bracketed ones that I liked, but none quite as much as this one, which isn’t bracketed. I was looking at the clouds after the sun had dipped below the horizon and noticed this jet flying through what looked like a corridor between the clouds.

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: , ,

Discontinued

 Photography, Techy Stuff  13 Responses »
Oct 152009
 


Well, it seems as if the commercially viable life of a digital camera is about 18 months, perhaps 2 years, depending upon how fast technology moves. The D300 was introduced in August of 2007. I bought mine in February of 2008.

Although I am about a month late in hearing about it, I see that Nikon has discontinued the D300, in favor of the D300s. The main differences between the two are the the ‘s’ model has HD video and a Live View button. The sensor and, for the most part, the entire camera are the same. Oh, and the D300 supports dual card slots. One for a CF card, the other for an SD card. There’s nothing here that would make me want to trade.

There is an interesting feature, Quiet Shutter Release mode. From Nikon’s site they say:

Also added to the D300s is a Quiet Shutter Release mode, which substantially reduces the sound of the mirror while shooting. Quickly accessed by selecting “Q” on the release mode dial, this feature is ideal for the photographer who wishes to remain unobtrusive.

I wonder how much quieter it would really be. Certainly not as quiet as a rangefinder! :-) Anyway, I’ll be keeping mine, after all, basketball season is around the corner!

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: , ,

Exposing to the right

 Photography, Techy Stuff  10 Responses »
Apr 022009
 



Mouse over image to see ‘exposed to right’.
I find that paper towels are not a very interesting subject, in and of themselves. I’ve never pursued one in the wild. I guess that they could be interesting if you were a product photographer for a company like Bounty or perhaps Brawny. However, they do serve a useful purpose photographically. No, I’m not talking about wiping off your camera after a bit of mist or rain, but in getting the most out of your camera’s exposure capabilities.

I’ve seen this article before. If you’ve not read it, head on over and check it out. It is interesting reading, I think. I kept meaning to try it one day, but never did. A couple of weeks ago, I finally did try it and that experiment put together a few pieces that had been floating around in my head. It was, so to speak, the missing piece of the puzzle.

Histograms and stuff
I’m not going to get technical here, but this bears mentioning. Most digital cameras have a mode where you can view the histogram, which shows a distribution of the light levels of a particular shot. Conventional wisdom says to expose ‘right’, which means get your histogram as close to the right side as you can without blowing out pixels. There is also another mode, highlights, that will blink if you are blowing out pixels. I’ve found that on my Nikon cameras, this highlight mode is very conservative, warning you almost a full stop, seemingly 2, before you really start to lose pixels. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

But what does this have to do with paper towels?
Well… If you do the paper towel test with your camera, you’ll find out how much leeway you have on the highlight side for exposure. Using this test you can see where your camera stops producing highlight details. For my D300 that’s about 3.3 stops of over exposure. Should I go beyond that, I start to lose highlight detail.

But you’ll have to use your spot meter!
In order to get the best advantage out of this, you’ll have to use the spot meter capability on your camera. If you’ve never used it before, it can be a new experience for you and quite useful. You simply point your camera at the brightest highlight area where you’d like to keep detail, take what the meter says, dial it up 3 more stops, take the picture.

Why is this important?
It seems that digital cameras are much more forgiving on the high side of things. Once you start to get into the shadows, you have to compete with digital noise, making shadow detail pretty dicey, especially at the higher ISO settings. In the above image, the sunlight was starting to shine pretty brightly and the contrast was pretty high, so I placed the camera in spot meter mode, pointed it at the clump of clover, which was the brightest part of the scene, set the camera to overexpose by 2 stops, and took the picture. Of course, the highlight warning was blinking, but I simply ignored it.

When I got it back into Lightroom, I moved the slider to ‘underexpose’ the image by 2 stops and that brought back all of the details. Then, I could use the exposure brush to bring back the shadows to the right place. This technique has come in very handy, especially with brightly lit skies having cloud detail that I’d like to keep.

Another technique to add to your arsenal!

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Nikon D300:An all weather camera.

 D300 Impressions, Photography, SoFoBoMo 09, Techy Stuff  8 Responses »
Apr 012009
 


Singing in the rain
First, let me start with a disclaimer. I’m not advocating that you use your camera the way that I use mine. You have to do you and let me do me. :-) Now, on with the show:

When I had my Nikon D2x, since it was Nikon’s flagship camera at the time, I used to take it out into the rain, and, snow, humidity, whatever. I figured that if they said that it was sealed against the weather, then it dang will better be, and it was! It was a great camera. Unfailing. Well, the D300 comes from good lineage! Nikon says of the D300:

Rugged magnesium-alloy construction: Along with advanced dust and moisture protection and a durable shutter mechanism: The D300 has been tested to 150,000 cycles making it the perfect choice for photographers who demand high performance and agility.


Hmmm: Advanced dust and moisture protection. Well, that sounds like a challenge to me. I’ve seen a few places where people talk about the weather proofing of the D300, but didn’t see where anyone had actually tried it. I saw on Luminous Landscape where Michael Reichmann talked about his experience on his Antarctic trip and how well the Nikon cameras did as a group in some tough conditions, but never had I seen any direct experience.

Three of the last four weekends, it has rained in Charlotte and I took advantage of every one of them. When I say rained, I mean it rained! The type of rain that would have you soaked in less than a minute or two. Unrelenting rain. Downpour! Perfect. I simply put on my boots, went out, found a place to take pictures, and let Nature have its way with me and my camera. I was not concerned about the camera, but was a little concerned about the lens. Both came through the ordeals just fine.

It was quite comical, to me at least, to see people cruising by in their cars, slowing down to see what moron was out shooting in heavy rain. Well, that moron was me. I was happily shooting away. Water was running over and off of my camera in small streams, down my forehead, around and through my eyes. I kept the sunshade on the lens and the camera pointed downward so as not to have to dry the lens … that would have been kind of tough anyway because there was barely a strip of dry cloth on me anywhere. I was soaked. Next time, I could use a rain poncho for myself! :-) However, I’m pretty waterproof.

Anyway, it was a fun time in the rain. The temperature was about 70 degrees (21 degrees C for my Metric friends) and the rain was nice and warm. So, three times in a row, the D300 proved itself under less than ideal conditions … as did the Tamron 18-270mm! Well done, guys!

No. I do not use any type of cover over the camera. I guess that you could say that I trust Nikon’s statement! So far, no leaks and no dust on the sensor in a whole year! Not a speck of dust that I can see! I had thought of doing something about shooting in the rain for SoFoBoMo, but I cannot trust that it will rain a lot in may or June! :-)

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

D300 Live View: Tripod mode

 Photography  11 Responses »
Dec 282008
 

I don’t use live view often, but it can come in handy. I find it pretty useful for taking shots that are close to the ground, especially when I don’t feel like getting my cheeks on the wet grass or rocks. Also, sometimes my knees just don’t want to do those deep bends.

This photo, though not that low to the ground, was taken using live view. This was the first time that I’ve used LV on the tripod, so I set it to tripod mode, tried to focus, just like I did in hand-held mode, and … nothing. It wouldn’t focus.

Well, after trying to get it to focus several times, it still wouldn’t do it no matter how many times that I pressed the shutter button. I switched to hand-held mode, tried it, it focused no problem. Hmmm? Switched back to tripod-mode and switched to a different lens, thinking that perhaps it had something to do with the Tamron 18-270. Nope. The 50mm Nikon lens didn’t work either. Sigh. Oh well, just manual focus, then. It worked well.

I even cheated a bit. I carry my manual with me. I checked the index, found the live view entry, opened opened the book to page 79 and found the LV instructions outlined it in 4 easy steps:

  1. Frame a picture in the viewfinder and focus
  2. Raise mirror and display view through lens in monitor
  3. Press + button to zoom in and focus
  4. Take pictures

Well, 1/2 of step one was working and it wasn’t the focusing part! I could frame the picture, but couldn’t focus. I started to think that maybe the latest firmware upgrade had caused this issue. Well, for sure, it wasn’t a show stopper. I continued on with manual focus. Sometimes you have to kick it old school!

The next morning, Saturday morning, I tried it again. Still no-go. I got out the manual again, this time reading the detailed instructions on page 86, which had an important note:

The camera cannot be focused by pressing the shutter-release button half way..

Well, I’ll be damned! How else would one focus it? Ah, that little button that I’ve never used … AF-On, which does the same thing. Apparently, this is the only way to get AF to work in Tripod LV mode!

Oh well, RTFM! :-)

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: ,

All ISO’s are not created equal!

 Photography, Techy Stuff  6 Responses »
Dec 042008
 


Sneaky shot! ISO 6400 + Live view. :-)

First, thanks to Mark Graf for pointing out this very interesting, at least to me, site. It’s called DxOMark. They compare digital camera sensors in terms of color fidelity, stated ISO vs. measured ISO, dynamic range, color range, etc.

I found out somethings that I didn’t know which will probably change, slightly, the way that I use my camera. For example, I did not know that a digital camera, such as the D300 was capable of recording a dynamic range of about 11 stops! Impressive! Back in the day, film gave about 5 or 6 tops. Now we get 11 and still want more! :-) I guess that we won’t be satisfied until the sensor can capture the same number of stops as our eyes do!

What I found interesting is that there is distinct, and steep slope of falloff in dynamic range as you increase ISO. For example, on the D300, you get about 11 stops at ISO 200, and and at ISO 6400, you are down to 6.6 stops! You’ve lost 5 stops of range. Perhaps, though, in thinking about it, if you are shooting at ISO 6400, you are probably well within that range anyway, save for the occasional street light. If you visit, make sure to move your mouse inside of the graph, then out. A picture will appear ‘under’ the graph. Then, move your mouse along the scale on the side. As you move up and down, it will show you the dynamic range changes on the photo. Cool stuff!

As I use a tripod most of the time and use ISO 200, and even ISO 100 (L 1.0), my camera is capable of capturing that range most of the time.

Kudos to Nikon for having the top 2 rated sensors. The D3 and the D700. The D300 came in around #11. I guess that that full frame sensor is a real peach, though I doubt that I could really tell the difference in two side-by-side pictures.

 Posted by Paul at 12:00 am  Tagged with: , ,
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