New (old) ultra-wide

One of the joys of the Nikon D700 is having your wideangle lenses back – no more x1.5 cropping. The downside of course is losing any DX (digital) designed wide so I’ve reluctantly parcelled up the 12-24mm f/4 G AF-S DX (IF) Zoom-Nikkor and sent it back to its owner. Having also sold my 10.5mm f/2.8G AF DX Fisheye I needed something truly wide for the D700. The logical choice would be the new professional quality 14-24mm f/2.8 zoom but frankly it’s too heavy for my way of working (walking around all-day with a camera around my neck!). The 14mm introduced at the time of Nikon D1 seemed to fit the bill and I’ve now had a couple of outings with it – one to Gateshead as you can see. At one-third the weight of the 14-24mm zoom it’s at least useable – and addictive but as much a curate’s egg as any other attempt I’ve every had at extreme wide-angle, fisheye or otherwise. With 114° coverage it has to be the widest optic I’ve ever used and requires some serious compositional thought as everything can simply look flat and distant without your getting in close and finding some foreground.

Nikon D700

A mature D-SLR at last. All the advantages of a full frame sensor with a modest pixel count – acceptable file size, decent enlargements (A2 not a problem) and low, low noise. I traded my D200 and DX lenses for a 700 last week. What a joy to be able to create images without troublesome noise at ISO 1600, even at 2000 and beyond the noise is more like colour neg film grain. Solid, if heavy (for me) camera. But the real delight is to program in a bunch of old manual lenses and go hunting with a trusty 50mm f/1.8 or vintage 55mm f/3.5 Micro Nikkor that act like they should regarding angle of view. Quickly profiled for Lightroom with a Macbeth ColorChecker – results very satisfying. There will be more to report.

Bronica RF645

Maryport

A good example of the way the standard 65mm f/4 Zenzanon lens on the Bronica RF645 handles light – Ilford HP5 developed in Prescysol EF – scanned from a 10×8 print.

Smile you’re on Coolpix

We used to joke about having  a ‘David Bailey’ mode on a camera that fired the shutter when the model and composition were just right. Nikon’s latest Coolpix range features a new level of face detection – providing a Smile Mode that fires the shutter when the subject smiles and a blink warning that let’s you know if the subject has blinked during the exposure. (I wish it joy of that with my partner who can beat any fundus camera or strobe light to the draw and get her eyes firmly shut before the picture is taken.) I don’t really want a camera that goes on holiday for me and sends back the pictures!

Living with the G9

In the first month of ownership  I’ve taken a few hundred images on the Canon Powershot G9. My overall impression is that I have probably found the ‘companion camera’ I was looking for. If only I could find someone who stocks the soft case life would be rosy!

Upsides:

• confidently detailed 12Mpx images
• speed of handling (now I’m using a 4Gb SDHC card)
• fantastic screen with auto rotate in playback
• ISO setting on a knob on the body
• ease of use in manual and semi-auto modes
• instant reversion to a compact ‘point and shoot’ for those occasions when you hand the camera to an inexperienced photographer (face detection almost guarantees sharpness and good exposure where it matters)

 

The downsides:

• slowness and difficulty focusing in Macro mode
• current lack of support for G9 images in either Camera Raw or Lightroom (colour is way out)
• the 80per cent view viewfinder
• exposures are bang on or too light and I regularly underexposure by 1/3-2/3 stops to get the look I want

Inevitable really…

I suppose I can resist anything except temptation – so I bought a Canon Powershot G9 which was delivered a week ago. Initial thoughts: very quick after the Olympus SP350 – even formatting a 4GB SDHC card. I am less troubled by the barrel distortion on wide angle than I thought I would be. Superb 3-inch screen – very pokey viewfinder, less use than I’d hoped – almost less useful than the Olympus as it show only 80%+. Picture quality is superb – well the JPEGs are. I haven’t yet installed Canon’s software but both Camera Raw 4.2 and Lightroom 1.2 produce ghastly magenta casts over RAW images from the camera – the corresponding JPEGs are perfectly colour balanced. Anyone out there know why? technically the G9 is not listed as a supported camera for Adobe RAW products. 

Nikon D200 ‘colour cast’

One of the delights of a blog is to see the search terms that bring people to your site. One of yesterday’s searches was ”d200 magenta cast”. I was beginning to think I was the only person who had noticed. I’ve never quite enjoyed the same degree of saturation accuracy and clarity of colour from my D200 than I got from my D100 – I put it down to the fact I had calibrated the D100 and used those figures in Camera Raw. I tried the same with the D200 – large adjustments in the red hue and saturation were suggested. All very odd – I’ve not got to the bottom of this and then Nikon announce the D300 – a whole new chip to get to grips with.

Temptation

My little Olympus SP350 produced good pictures from our trip up the West Highland line. On getting home I see Canon may have announced a camera to replace the SP350 – the PowerShot G9. The G7 offered most things I wanted: viewfinder, manual exposure and focus but had no RAW mode – which for me is a must. The revised G9 has that, image stabilisation plus a 12Mpx CCD and a 3inch LCD. Santa may be getting a letter yet.

Portable drive

Having just upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 1.1 (more of which later) I  decided to put my early digital images onto a portable drive to catalogue and keyword them – finally. I got lucky – a shallow trawl threw up the Seagate FreeAgent Go drive as a cost effective solution. Unusually one was bought on the spur of the moment from a local PC World – the last 160Gb a store full of 120Gb drives. Apart from the surprise at finding a double ended USB cable – one for signal, both for power – the drive reformats for the Mac (just junk the Windows Vista backup stuff and attack with Drive Utility) at 149Gb useable. Speed is acceptably quick – copying two full 690Mb CDs in parallel takes about 6 minutes. The illuminated front panel is seriously attractive but the colours are not a delight. Cataloguing is going well…