The Online Photographer

Oil Shots

I don't know if you're like me, but on a new day with the camera in my hands again, I can feel stopped-up, hesitant, embarrassed. I feel a certain resistance to raising the camera to my eye and taking that first shot.

When I feel that way, the way I get over it is to shoot. I've always considered the first roll of film to be a sort of 3-in-1 oil for my shooting brain. With digital, what's the equivalent? 36 shots doesn't quite do it. Almost. More like the first 50 shots on the card.

Once you get over those first 50 shots, you're flowing. Shooting begets shooting. You get over any hesitancy, clear away the crud of lack of confidence. That rusty reticence fades.

First task when I go shooting: get those first 50 shots on the card as quickly as possible. Only then does the metal-on-metal stop squeaking and grinding. Then you can get down to it.

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Mike

Talk About Bounce!

Bounce, n., a positive collateral effect arising from attention elsewhere, as in a sudden rise in traffic on a website following an article about it, or a sudden rise in sales of a product resulting from a positive review.

Talk about bounce—our friend Kirk Tuck, first introduced to denizens of the web back in 2001 when he wrote a long and thoughtful review of the Leica M6 on Photo.net, has written a book, published by the longtime photo how-to specialist Amherst Media, called Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography. (I have the book sitting here waiting patiently in my review queue.) Well, the other day, it was positively reviewed on Strobist.com by another friend, David Hobby, and directly afterward, Kirk reports, it shot up to #22 on Amazon's best-seller list.

Note: that's not #22 on Amazon's photography bestseller list. That's the main list, as in, all the books Amazon sells.

Now that's impressive.

Granted, the bounce—well, that degree of bounce—didn't last long. When I looked this morning, Minimalist Lighting was #200 and falling, although that's still pretty impressive for a photography title.

You may or may not be aware that Amazon's real-time bestseller rankings are almost a focus of obsession with many authors. I know writers who check the status of their book sales like some investors keep tabs on the stock market. And there are novelists who would kill for #200 for any length of time, much less #22. For instance, #22 this morning is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the sophomore effort and first novel by Dominican-American author Junot Diaz that just won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In any event, I think we can dub David the Oprah Winfrey of photography books.

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Mike

Mark Hamburg Leaves Adobe

Jeff Schewe reports at PhotoshopNews that Mark Hamburg last week left Adobe to work for Microsoft. Hamburg was the second engineer at Adobe hired to work on Photoshop, after Thomas Knoll, and is considered one of the architects of Photoshop, which he worked on until v. 7.0. He is the founder and primary engineer of the Shadowland Project, which became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

There are rumors wafting about the 'net that he will not be working on imaging at Microsoft, but that he'll be part of a crack team being assembled to look at the MS OS from the ground up in the wake of the, er, mixed reception given to Vista. Rumors. (Interestingly, Jeff Schewe says, "Mark doesn't do Windows all that well, he's quite the Mac bigot.")

Mark Hamburg was named inventor of the year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association in 1999 and was elected to the National Association of Photoshop Professionals' Hall of Fame in 2003. We thank him for his services to photographers and join the chorus of those wishing him well.

Jeff Schewe, Mark’s last walk down the Adobe halls (on his way to his Adobe HR exit interview)

More: Martin Evening's article at Lightroom-News.com

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Michael Reichmann)

Then and Now and Here and There

Youngme—Nowme
One of the really interesting aspects of photography—and one of the few of aspects of it that hasn't been exploited fully, although Nicholas Nixon's portraits of the Brown Sisters and the famous and excellent Rephotographic Survey Project leap to mind*—is its fascinating ability to compare subjects through time.

"Youngme—Nowme" winning entry by "pebble_it"

It's interesting that in written fiction, especially before the rise of the importance of film rights, it was commonplace for authors to track characters through large chunks of their lifetimes (think Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations), or even chronicle families through several generations. Early films tried to follow that lead, with decidedly mixed results. "Movie time" comes into conflict with novelistic time in various ways. You can apply a heavy armor of old-person makeup to an actor, like Dustin Hoffman playing the superannuated version of Jack Crabbe in the film "Little Big Man," and of course it's a commonplace in movies to have a similar-looking kid play a character-when-young, with the familiar, portentous jump through puberty denoting the shifting of gears from backstory to main story. Recently, the TV show "Cold Case" has had some success (also some lack of success) casting different actors to play the same character at different points in their lives. But for the most part fictive film-making runs into problems with spans of times that are too much longer than, or different than, the time it took to make the film.

Film and television even run into problems the other way too—witness all the sitcoms over the years that expired because the cute kids grew up (and the sitcom families who mysteriously acquired an additional cute kid as the original families aged, e.g., "The Cosby Show"), or the now excessively matured actors in the Harry Potter movies. Part of the genius of animated shows like the long-running "The Simpsons" (my son loves the Simpsons) is that Bart and the others can leap forward or backward in time on occasion but also effortlessly (and apparently eternally) stay the same age; there is even one animated sitcom, called "King of the Hill," where the story lines almost never depart from scenes that could be played by human actors, the advantage of the animated ones presumably being simply that they're more tractable and unchanging (and probably have less onerous salary demands). Honorable mention under this heading goes to all the aging A-list actors who can't seem to wean themselves away from vanity leading man roles despite the fact that they've gotten too old for the parts. Although I guess they play the parts in real life, too, so maybe they think it's normal.

In any event, check out Color Wars' popular "Youngme—Nowme" series…that is if your friend/relative who forwards to you all their favorite wacky internet jetsam hasn't emailed the link to you already. A brilliant, simple idea, obviously fun for some of the participants. I'm not much for the cutesy stuff, generally, but if some of these don't make you smile you've got a hard heart. Don't neglect to click on "View Entire Gallery" at the link. Comparos like these emphasize the ticking of the cosmic clock, but they're charming.

Sinister parallel
And in a sort of dark-side counterpart to the Youngme—Nowme photo pairs, there are a slew of videos on YouTube chronicling the alarming physical deterioration of meth addicts. The comparisons, sometimes sensationalized and doubtless meant to serve as deterrents, are nevertheless both genuinely frightening and frequently also poignant, reminding us again, if we need to be reminded, that none among us, when we're young and healthy, intends to go on to ruin our own lives, our health, our bodies; yet it happens.

John Kennerdell, from Mekong Express

Studio Hatyai
Our old friend John Kennerdell (John wrote one of the original bokeh articles for me at Photo Techniques a decade or so ago) has recently revamped his website entirely. Reserve some quality time for Studio Hatyai—there's some really wonderful stuff in these portfolios. My favorite is probably Mekong Express (shot, by the way, with a Canon 5D and 35mm ƒ/2 EF lens, made to mimic a Minolta Autocord or something similar loaded with Plus-X), but it's not easy to choose.

Working with the light in Newlyn
Hugh Symonds sent me a link to some pictures he took with a Zeiss 25mm ƒ/2.8 lens an a Nikon D3. I couldn't tell much about the equipment, but I liked the pictures quite a lot. It made me wonder why, with all the arty stuff and scenic stuff on the web, more people aren't convinced by the merits of good, solid documentary. Anyway I liked Hugh's pictures and maybe you will too.

Caught in the act
And finally, our own Carl Weese was recently caught in the act by a newspaper photographer while covering a local anti-war demonstration. He says, "...when the presumed Marine One (or a decoy)** flew over the site of the protest I dropped low to shoot the protesters holding their signs up at the aircraft. I saw Jim Shannon of the Waterbury Republican-American aiming right back at me to shoot the protesters from the front." Here's Jim's picture, grabbed from the paper's website:

Photo credit: Jim Shannon, Waterbury Republican-American

That's Carl crouching by the road, K20D in the business position. Typically, Oren (T.O.P.'s barely-visible Mandarin Advisor) zeroed right in on the fact that the lady on the right appears to be commemorating the scene with a vintage Pentax Spotmatic. I, for my part, also probably typically, was tickled by the fact that the lady on the front left has made a veritable craft project out of her sign, complete with artfully-arrayed bombs and a peach color scheme to complement the word "IMPEACH." A nice, friendly, color-coordinated sort of anti-war protester—she probably has a hand-knitted "Eat the Rich" tea cozy at home. Funny, and somehow touching.

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Albano and many others for the "Youngme" link, Hugh, John K., and, as ever, Oren and Carl)

*I could kick myself for never buying the now rare and prized Second View when it was available—I thought about it enough times—although you can now buy the latest update of the project, Third Views, Second Sights without any trouble.

**The Presidential helicopter, for those of you in other countries.

Featured Comment by Adam Isler: "You should really add Diego Goldberg's "The Arrow of Time" to this compendium—it traces a single family over the course of 31 years (and counting), on the same date each year, starting with the parents and including the three children, all now grown."

Scandale du Jour

It seems that perfectly innocent young girls keep growing up to be women who like sex, an ongoing commercial and social problem. The latest scandale du jour revolves around a just-revealed Annie Leibovitz portrait of one Miley Cyrus in this week's Vanity Fair that is causing outrage and concern among parents from coast to coast. The 15-year-old Cyrus, star of Disney's relentlessly wholesome and even more relentlessly profitable "Hannah Montana" franchise, was pictured by Leibovitz in a pose that is unrevealing but, well, unwholesome. The problem? Young girls look up to "Hannah Montana" as a role model, and parents do not want them thinking that they might grow up to be women who like sex.

The solution proposed by T.O.P.? Better role models. We have an obvious suggestion. She's smart. She's progressive. She does well in school. She takes fashion cues from Barbara Bush (the pearls). She's a vegetarian. True, she's orange, but that's probably the carrot juice. She plays jazz saxophone, fer cryin' out loud—how cool is that? And although a dalliance with Milhouse is sometimes suggested, it has never been hinted to be unwholesome. Finally, after seventeen years of being eight, it appears highly unlikely that she is ever going to do anything so inconvenient and potentially commercially disastrous as mature. D'oh! Perfect.

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Mike  (Photo credit: Vanity Fair)

Featured Comment by Cyril: "I hate to disagree with the editor of this site but my vote goes for Dora the explorer. At least she knows how to dress, and she's even been going green lately—now how cool is that for a role model. Of course she also has an unclear relationship with a monkey wearing rubber-boots, but I'm sure she can explain."

Coda:

Miley Cyrus and Annie Leibovitz. Photo Credit: Vanity Fair magazine

Pentax K20D Report—Part III: Color, Tone: New Features

By Carl Weese

Last time we looked at some test results working with RAW files. Of course not everyone likes to work with RAW. The K10D offered two flavors of JPEG: Natural, and Bright. While not quite Baskin Robbins yet, the K20D has expanded the line of JPEG flavor offerings considerably. These are accessed from the Function button (not the general menu) and include: Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, and Monochrome. Mono lets you select modes that mimic filter effects: None, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Magenta, Blue, Cyan, Infrared Color. You can punch in warmer or cooler toning of the monochrome image and customize contrast and sharpening.

In each of the color modes you can alter the starting point and punch in your own changes to Saturation, Hue, Contrast, and Sharpness. The various modes are in themselves simply pre-set suites of these settings. Natural looks good to me, especially if the Contrast setting is backed off one or two clicks. In fact that looks very close to the ACR 4.4.1 interpretation of the RAW file on my defaults (which use slightly lower black point and contrast settings than Adobe’s defaults). If I need to shoot RAW+JPEG in order to have immediate access to non-RAW files, that’s the setting I will use. All of the others are variations on the theme of “how I don’t want my pictures to look.” Hyped-up candy-apple color. To someone else of course these may be nice bright colors that look just right.

Going back to that white-clipping test on the RAW files, the Natural JPEG mode will mimic the results of that test, but without the benefit of ACR’s Recovery function. That is, there should be full detail through 2.3 stops above the middle, but then clipping will set in and be quite severe at +2.7. So these JPEGs will have less retention of highlight, less reach into the high values than RAW files even on default. The Pentax Photo Lab software will observe these settings in presenting you a default view of a RAW file, but of course since it is RAW you can make any changes you want; the camera settings serve only as a starting point. The other JPEG flavors will reduce the tonal range even more—this is the tradeoff for the questionable benefit of snappier contrast and higher saturation. Happily, none of these settings have any permanent effect on the RAW files, so if you want to play with these controls I recommend setting the camera to RAW+. I admit I’m curious to see what happens with the monochrome settings and will report when I’ve had a chance to play.

Here’s a really novel feature that I’m only going to describe briefly because it would take a lot of testing and experience to get a handle on it. The K20D offers “expanded dynamic range.” What’s that, you say? Let’s look in the manual: “By using the Expand Dynamic Range function, you can expand the light level expressed by the CMOS sensor pixels, making it more difficult for bright areas to occur in the image.”

Right….

To turn it on, you go to the ISO settings through the function button, then hit the function button again to toggle from normal to “D-Range 200%.” When you do, ISO settings below 200 become unavailable. JPEGs shot with d-range on show a big increase in ability to hold apparent highlight information. I say apparent because, while there’s an enormous increase in how far up you can expose without clipping (farther than a RAW file on defaults) there’s something funny about the color information. Like using a massive amount of Recovery in ACR, this appears to be extrapolated rather than direct data. Another serendipitous accident: when I first ran a highlight test with d-range on, I neglected to reset a manual WB setting from a previous test. This resulted in a slightly yellow color in the test run. The normal JPEG files showed this warm bias from mid value up to +2.3, above which they clipped. The d-range JPEGs held off clipping all the way to +3.7, but the color had lost its yellow cast, gone nearly neutral, by +2.

Pictures of actual subjects consistently show an effect on JPEG files from the d-range feature, but the effect varies greatly depending on the subject and brightness range of the scene. In high contrast situations like backlight or harsh cross-lighting, the feature can give a dramatic improvement. On more normal subjects it can sometimes give a strange HDR-like appearance. Mid-tones are generally raised, but shadows are almost completely unaffected. In many cases the blending effect reduces color saturation. If you want to play a real game of concentration, you could try testing those jazzier JPEG flavors like Bright and Vibrant combined with d-range.

Here's the clutter next to my imaging computer, harshly lit by a desk lamp. The histogram from a JPEG shot on Natural  shows clipping of the highlights (this low rez view hides how high the right side of the histogram goes up the wall).

The 72 ppi sRGB screen grab of a shot at the same settings but with d-range turned on probably won't show much improvement on your monitor, but look at that histogram. There is a major improvement in the highlights and upper middle tones, though no real change in the shadows.

Here’s what I think is going on. They call it 200%, and you lose the first stop of normal sensor ISO range. I think the camera is doing a form of HDR on the fly, combining the basic data of a shot at ISO 200 (for example) with the highlight detail that would have been captured at ISO 100. The effect is tricky. It’s quite difficult to get exactly the same look by adjusting a RAW file in ACR, although it’s easy to get a similar, just-as-good-or-better result. For anyone who has to shoot JPEG files it would be a good idea to get a handle on this feature because the improvements in some situations are very real. But I don’t think it should be used as a “set it and forget” default option. One last point on d-range: unlike all the other picture flavors offered by the K20D, this one affects RAW files. Not anywhere near as much as JPEGs, but RAW files shot with the feature turned on hold a little more highlight detail than with it off. You can avoid clipping at +3.3 with less, almost no, Recovery. The effect is even slightly different for PEF and native DNG captures. So it looks as though both the sensor and the JPEG engine are participating in this game.

Getting smarter
Now on to some reactions to actual picture taking with the K20D. The first thing I noticed examining folders of files in Bridge was that the camera’s automatic white balance has gotten a whole lot smarter. Accurate AWB is vital for shooting JPEGs since substantial color correction of an 8-bit file is bound to cause quality losses. With RAW a bad AWB just forces you to fix it, there’s no loss of quality (an exception is if you were setting your exposure using a tri-color histogram and the WB was so far off that, once corrected, you get clipping in a channel that was unclipped at the wrong WB). But it’s nice to open a folder and see a slew of consistent captures without spending the first part of a work session changing the temp/tint settings of every other exposure. While on this, a nice touch is that the camera lets you fine-tune the AWB. The default setting was too green and too warm for my taste, but through the function button it was easy to open a color box and move the hot spot left and down to adjust the color to my preference. ACR tracks this change and shows the adjusted color as long as WB is left at the default “as shot.”

Spinos Pawn Shop, Waterville, Connecticut

(Auto white balance, auto (program) exposure on multi-segment metering, DNG on the defaults in ACR run through my usual web-posting batch action.)

The next thing I noticed was that the multi-segment pattern metering also seems to have had its IQ raised. Exposure compensation is needed less often, and when needed, you don’t have to use as much. I’m actually having to re-train myself to dial in less compensation with the new camera. Of course the fact that there is a bit more overall dynamic range than offered by the K10D may be helping the meter by giving it a broader target to hit.

Next installment will be after I’ve had a chance to do a lot more actual picture taking.

_______________________

Previously:
Pentax K20D Report Part I: Focus
Pentax K20D Report Part II: The CMOS Sensor

_______________________

Carl

Carl's website 
Working Pictures
WPII

What Do You Shoot?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Apple Riding a 51% Jump in Mac Sales

By John Markoff, The New York Times

San Francisco—Signs of a consumer slowdown abound in the United States, but Apple customers appear not to have noticed.

Buoyed by unusually strong Macintosh sales, the company grew notably faster than the rest of the computer market worldwide in the first three months of the year. Revenue increased 43 percent from the same period a year ago, the company reported. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, characterized the quarter as the strongest in Apple’s history....

READ ON at nytimes.com

_____________________

Mike

Not So Fast

It appears that yesterday, I was guilty of the common mental error of believing what I wanted to believe. I like the idea of Adobe DNG (digital negative)—a vendor-independent raw standard that works across platforms and promises unlimited future support. The DNGs I was shooting with the K20D were opening up in my older copy of Photoshop, and they looked great.

But appearances can be deceiving. Go into ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) and look at the numbers in the "White Balance" box, and you'll notice they can be way screwy—on my DNGs, temperature was 7000 Kelvin for one picture and tint was +97 for another, in fairly neutral light. That's not right. Carl tells me that's because the LUTs (lookup tables) are not proper for the camera and the raw file is not being unpacked properly. He wrote about this last year in his series of posts on the K10D, when he noticed the raw files didn't behave right until he got a version of ACR in which the K10D was supported.

So, even if you're using DNG, it's still necessary to use a version of ACR (or whatever raw converter you choose) that specifically supports the K20D (or whatever camera you own). With Adobe products, you need ACR 4.4 or Lightroom 1.4 to get K20D support. ACR 4.4.1, the latest version, is not compatible with versions of Photoshop prior to CS3, although it is usable with updated copies of Lightroom and with Photoshop Elements later than version 4.0 for Macintosh and 5.0 for Windows.

Carl is currently shooting PEFs (that's Pentax's proprietary raw file type) because they're smaller files, then immediately converting them to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter, which is a free download.

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Carl for setting me straight)

Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy

Hope you're not getting jaded about the K20D-fest here at TOP, because we've still got a ways to go yet. Carl's next installment will be published on Monday morning.

In the interim, he's asked me to post the following:

"The Pentax Browser and Photo Lab software disc that shipped with the K20D/K200D has a problem. It can't carry out an installation on Macs. The solution is to go to www.pentaximaging.com, locate the K20D product page, scroll to the bottom and click software update. You can then download the software with installer. The download and installation just went successfully with an iMac G5 and iBook G4."

Personally, I've been advocating for cameras that shoot DNG (Adobe Digital Negative, an open-standard raw format) for a long time, and the K20D has a menu setting for native DNG. Select it, and you're done. The files open right up in my not-so recent copy of LightZone and in my aging version of Photoshop. They'll open in Lightroom, too. Done and done, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure our brain trust (i.e., you readers, collectively) can come up with a dozen reasons why it might be better to use some other workflow for raw capture, but personally I'm not the type to make exhaustive / neurotic comparisons of the myriad ways of getting from capture to picture editing app. Irresponsible reviewing not to examine all the possibilities, you say? Well, heck, I still haven't learned all the features in Photoshop. I don't know about your life, but my life's too short.

[Note: I'm afraid I have to go back on these statements somewhat. I've since had some problems with DNG files in programs where the specific camera I'm using, the K20D, is not supported. So please don't assume from my comments here that opening the K20D's native DNG files in programs in which the K20D is not supported will be problem-free.]

Six is good
The weather here has been lousy for two days, so I've been discouraged from shooting more with the DA 35 Macro, despite a rather uncommonly itchy shutterfinger (hey, that's the title of my friend Gordon's new blog). So here's one more example from the other day.

This was taken with the lens wide open at ƒ/2.8, ISO 400. My friend Nick, among many other things, is my one degree of separation from Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably one of the two greatest photographers of the 20th century—Nick knew Henri personally.

Based on this one shot alone, I might rate the 35 Macro's bokeh at about a 6 wide open, in terms of my standard Bokeh Ratings. That's good for wide open.

And here's a detail of a little area of Nick's right shoulder. (Here we go—blatant pixel-peeping.) To be honest, I don't know how to ensure that any given TOP illustration will reliably open at a set magnification on your monitor (I've probably been told, and forgot), but if you click on this, it should be somewhere around 150%. At any rate, it shows the tight, clean, film-like grain that Carl was talking about the other day (Part II —> Noise).

Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy
So, don't I have anything more to say about the camera itself, apart from the lens? I'm sure I will—not having enough to say is something of which I'm seldom accused. But I'll mention my basic impression based on my new theory of what camera to buy.

Recently I've been trying to analyze my camera-buying advice to actual individuals, compared to what they actually bought. I came to the realization that a) I'm usually trying to get people to buy bigger cameras, and b) people will almost always actually buy based on size—they'll buy the biggest camera they feel they want to deal with.

For some people, having a camera in the cellphone is just as much as they want to deal with. They already carry a phone, a personal organizer, an iPod, this'n'that little electronic gewgaw, and they just don't want to carry an extra thingy for picture-taking, even if it's the size of a pack of playing cards.

One step up, and you find the people who will carry the camera that's the size of the pack of playing cards, but they just don't want to move up to something the size of, say, the Canon G9—because it doesn't fit in a shirt pocket. That disqualifies it for them. Then you have the people who will deal with the G9 but not, say, the Olympus E-410. Next comes a slew of folks who will deal with an entry-level DSLR but not the mid-level ones. And so on.

At the apex of this taxonomy are pros, who not only carry a camera body "the size and weight of a telephone book," as I once put it (exaggerating as usual), but maybe even several of them.

Curiously, Ansel Adams—the other greatest photographer of the 20th century, in my view—was asked incessantly what kind of camera he used (I confess I asked him that myself—lame!). He had a standard answer: "The biggest one I can carry!" When he was young and vigorous he carried an 8x10 view camera, and in his later years, the "biggest he could carry" was a Hasselblad medium-format outfit.

There's an obvious penalty for choosing a camera that's too big: it sits at home.

So anyway, that's my new theory of camera-buying advice: I'm going to advise people to carry the biggest camera they feel they want to deal with. I haven't made very many actual recommendations based on this new theory yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

So anyway, all the foregoing is a very long-winded preamble for my very first first impression of the K20D and 35mm Macro: I think the combo is really just at the outside edge of bigness for me. It comes up to the very verge of being too big but doesn't go over.

One thing I learned about my Konica-Minolta 7D and 28–75mm zoom was that it was just plain too big, speaking for my own self. I just didn't like carrying it places. I resisted taking it with me. I never got over that. But with the K20D I've already caught myself climbing into the car and thinking, crap, better go get the camera—what if I see something? So far, I'd rather have it with me than not…this being the crucial test of Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy.

More soon. In the meantime, have a nice weekend, and good light.

____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: "Different raw processing programs (Photoshop vs. Capture One Pro, for example) can actually interpret camera raw files a little bit differently even when they are DNG files rather than the proprietary raw files that a lot of cameras produce. I'm sure the folks who produce these programs would say the difference is significant and their program is best. I've just found them different, not better or worse, for the kind of photography you and I do. Let's put it this way—the difference is far less than shooting the same scene on Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Fuji—and we didn't use to whine when we did that."

Random Excellence: Mike Chisholm

Mike Chisholm, from Brilliant Corners

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Mike

Random Excellence: Cassiopeia A

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

Cassiopeia A is the most recent supernova in the Milky Way and is among the most-studied objects in the sky. The supernova occurred ten years before the death of Spinoza and twenty years before the publication of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, but it was not widely observed by astronomers of the era.

Photo credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Lawrence Siegel: "You might be interested to know that a large number of Hubble images are now on display in Baltimore's Walters Art Museum as part of a show entitled MAPS. The images are knockouts!"

Featured Comment by Thiago Silva: "It's a common misconception to assume that satellite and astronomical 'photos' are real color. In fact, 90% of the images you see are in fact composites of bands taken at different wavelength intervals, or single bands which are mapped to a color scale. Most of these images are in a spectral range invisible to us, and are assigned a 'false color' to be better interpreted by our eyes.

"An example:



"A perfect real color view, right? The city is gray, the vegetation is green, the water is blue. All good, except that this image is a composite of short-wave infrared, near-infrared and red channels. The SWIR is assigned to red, because soils reflect more in that range. NIR is assigned to green, because it's where vegetation reflects the most. And the red channel is assigned to blue, since only wavelengths in the visible range penetrate water bodies. Had this image been a real color [image], the vegetation would be almost black, the waters a murky brown, and the whole image would be very foggy as most of the atmospheric interference occurs in the blue range.

"These color assignments are still grounded on knowledge about optical and electromagnetic theory, and are defined to highlight features of interest to the scientists. As our eyes can see a much larger range of color than of shades of gray, we use it as a tool to analyze images. But they are not 'artistic' choices. Some of them look more 'artistic' than others, and those probably are the ones disclosed to the press, but it is wrong to assume there is no science behind the color mapping."

Featured Comment by Simon Griffee: "Hubble site —> Behind The Pictures —> Color as a Tool."

The SMC Pentax DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited

I began to do just a few basic trials today with the new Pentax SMC DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited, to start to get a handle on how this new lens for reduced-size sensors behaves.

Physically the lens is quite small, about the size of a normal lens for a 35mm camera, although it is not a "pancake" lens like the other Pentax DA compacts (the 21mm, 40mm, and 70mm). It is all-metal and finely finished. Unlike many "normal" macro lenses it does not have a deeply recessed front element, but it has a built-in, pull-out lenshood that extends out a little less than an inch.

I'm not a macro photographer, and I have probably taken about as many macro shots in my 28 years as a photographer as I've taken pictures with on-camera flash—which is to say, almost none. My own interest in this lens would be as an all-purpose normal prime that effectively doesn't have a close-focusing limitation. Still, I presume that many potential purchasers would be interested in its macro capabilities. I gave it a brief trial by tossing my keys on the deck and taking a quick snap for a size reference, then switching the K20D to manual focus, setting the lens to its close-focusing point, and moving in on the subject until I had it in focus. The light was bright afternoon sunlight.

This was taken at a moderate aperture, hand-held, so I'm sure real macro photographers could do much better in terms of resolution and the proper depth of field. As a quick'n'dirty measure of "just how macro you can go," however, it should give you an idea—I could actually get so close that the lens hood, when extended, touched the keys.

Here's a detail of the shot above, which should be around 100% if you click on the image.

Next I did eight or ten quick trials to begin to see about flare performance, and I must say this lens, initially at least, is very impressive in this regard. In the shot below, the very bright sun (we enjoyed a very clear day here in Southeastern Wisconsin today—the best day of the year so far, in fact) was only partially obscured by the tree, so that this scene was uncomfortable to look at with the unaided eye. Despite this, the image remains admirably contrasty, with minimal flare artifacts. With my eyes, I couldn't see the wire passing closest to the sun, but the lens has rendered it very well, with almost no color anomalies and excellent contrast. You can't see this at web resolution, but in the original file there is both detail and color in the body of the bird. I'll continue to think of new ways to trick this lens into flaring out, but for the time being it has stood up to my nefarious mistreatment most impressively.

Next is a picture of yr. hmbl. correspondent, taken over the gunwales of two lunch boats at a local Japanese restaurant by my friend and fellow-photographer Nick Hartmann. (Our friend Josh Hawkins, an award-winning photojournalist from Chicago, was in town for a mental-health day—our mental health, he must have meant.)

 

By all means, don't waste time looking at my ugly mug—look at the important part of the picture: the bokeh. I must say that even in light of my affliction (no one should pay as much attention to bokeh as I do), my early impressions of this lens are quite favorable. The bokeh resembles nothing so much as that from an old Leica Summarit.

I won't show you any examples of corner resolution—I'm sure you don't want to see pictures of my lawn grass and my arbor vitae—but I'm not seeing any evidence of corner smearing so far. I need to be slightly more disciplined in my testing procedures before I make any pronouncements about that, however.

You probably think I throw everything up on T.O.P. but the kitchen sink, so here, without ado, is the kitchen sink. In the larger file the color shadings are admirably subtle, I can't detect pixel jaggies even at 100%, and it's easy to tell the plate is half covered with water. The image files from this camera and lens are generally just lovely. By the way, all the images in this post were shot in native DNG, opened in ACR, and resized for the web. A slight amount of unsharp mask (radius 1.2, amount 35) was applied to the pictures that open larger when you click on them (but not the two closeup details). I didn't adjust color at all. Everything was metered by the camera except the kitchen sink, where I aimed the camera off to the right a bit, hit AEL, and then reframed and shot. Again, no color correction.

It's far too early to get excited about a new lens when you've only done a few quick trials over a mere day and a half, but what I can say is—so far, so good. I shall keep you posted.

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Ctein: To address some questions in the comments: for close-up work, the focal length of the lens you use has no effect on your depth of field. That's entirely determined by your image magnification and your lens aperture. This is not true for distant photography, where the focal length of the lens can be very important, but if you're talking about anything at greater than 0.1X magnification focal length will never play a significant part.

Here's a useful equation that gives the depth of field on either side of the point at which are focused,  as a function of image magnification (M):

DOF = C * f / (M^2)

C is the circle of confusion

f is the effective lens aperture: that is, the one that's been corrected for lens extension. If you're using the f# indicated on the lens ring, then replace f with f# * (M +1)

This is a very common misconception—that for a constant magnification, lens focal length affects depth of field in macro work but doesn't affect it in normal photography. In truth, it's  just the opposite.

The K20D Arrives

I received my own K20D from Pentax yesterday, a loaner, complete with the nifty new 35mm macro Limited lens. Although I don't know how I'm going to be able to add much of anything useful to Carl's evolving multi-part review. I will say that this lens makes a particularly nice match for the camera.

Whenever I get a new camera I like, I can't seem to help wandering around the house snapping random pictures of whatever's handy. Their willingness to model (well, okay, utter indifference to modeling) strikes me as yet one more of the manifold felicities of dogs.

That's my chair, by the way.

___________________

Mike

Random Excellence: Andri Pol

Andri Pol, Airshow

(See, now isn't that more fun than Photoshop?)

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Adrian)

Pentax K20D Report—Part II: The CMOS Sensor

By Carl Weese

Link to Amazon U.S. K20D page

Link to Amazon U.K. K20D page

We're about to look at first impressions of the new sensor in the K20D, but first, the result of some serendipitous testing. Monday morning I decided to repeat two tests (white clipping point and ISO/noise) from last week, this time using both K10D and K20D cameras one right after the other so the files can be compared side-by-side. For ISO I set the tripod about seven feet from a cluttered bookcase. Lots of detail, many bright whites and dark shadows to show off noise. Without thinking about it, I used my 21mm DA Limited, letting the cameras handle focus while I fiddled with the ISO settings. I've had the K20D less than a week and already forgot about "the focus issue." The 21mm has been diagnosed by the K20D as needing a +6 custom AF focus point adjustment. The files from the K20D were in perfect focus, but the set from the K10D was off by a country mile. So bad that I couldn't use them to evaluate noise at 100% view.

This presented an opportunity. The K20D has given my 40mm DA Limited a clean bill of health: perfect AF calibration. So I repeated the series using the longer lens. Both cameras nailed the focus. A lovely, if accidental, confirmation of the accuracy and usefulness of the AF calibration feature. I'd also been wondering to what extent a calibration derived from tests of a small target at just a couple feet would hold at longer distances. This showed it holding perfectly at seven feet, and real-world pictures I've been making the past few days show it tracking fine into the middle and far distance. Here's what a simple focus test target looks like, as seen by the camera during the test:

Angle of approach should be 45 degrees. Make the AF focus on the dark line in center, then, at high magnification, see if the sharpest plane lies in front or back. (This is Tim Jackson's focus test chart.)

The sensor
Now on to that new CMOS sensor. The pixel horsepower race being what it is, of course the first point is the pixel count. At 14.6 MP it's not only a 46% increase over the K10D, it's also out front of the price-class competition, at least for the moment. So my first impression is, these files are big! Each RAW capture takes up 23.2 megs of storage space, so an 8 gig SD card fills up with 334 captures. 165 shots fill up an archive DVD. A 16-bit file opened from RAW into Photoshop weighs in at 83 megs.

The main reason to seek more pixels is to make bigger prints with less up-interpolation of the data. At 360 ppi (my standard since it's native for the Epson pro-stylus printer I use) the print has grown from the K10D's 7.2 x 10.75 inches non-interpolated or native file to 8.62 x 12.98 inches. Probably more important, the amount of up-interpolation needed to make a print 22 inches wide has dropped from 204.5% down to 169.5%. I have not made prints yet, because I will first have to test to find out what combination of interpolation and sharpening works best for these files. The effect of the higher pixel count is plain to see on screen, though. I have not worked with a CMOS sensor before and will have to feel my way into getting the character of this thing, but my first impressions are favorable.

From Town Plot, Waterbury, Connecticut

Sunday till mid-day there was luminous light under slowly clearing clouds. This capture, made on auto exposure with no compensation, holds the full range of values with beautiful tonal transitions right on the defaults in ACR.

In particular, from my first pictures of real subjects, I get a sense of smoothness, of more seamless tonal transitions throughout the range, while the general feel of the color is similar to the K10D. At the same time, detail looks very "optical" to me. That is, edges and textures look the way I expect a lens to render them, not as though they've been artificially generated by a computer. The terms "plasticky" and "film-like" get tossed around a bit—so far my impression is the K20D results are in the latter camp.

The main concerns when engineers pack almost half again as many pixels onto the same size sensor are a potential loss of dynamic range and possible increase in noise. For dynamic range, I'm most concerned to know how far up into the highlights I can go before losing data to clipping. To test this I place a smooth piece of card stock in perfectly even light and aim the camera on tripod at it. I make a bracket around neutral gray, based on the camera's spot meter (good time to check whether the other meter modes agree reasonably). Then starting at 2 stops over-exposure (Zone VII to classicists) I move the exposure up 1/3 of a stop at a time. Download and open the set of exposures as a group in ACR and check densities with eyedropper and histogram. The card exposed as middle gray came in at level 128 for the K10D, 119 for the K20D, a difference of something like 1/8th or 1/6th of a stop. Both cameras held full detail, no clipping, with space between the sharp peak of narrow histogram and the right wall, up to 2.3 stops above middle. Each showed a touch of clipping at 2.7: the K10D file came back with a Recovery setting of 4. The K20D needed a Recovery of just 2. At three stops up, the K10D recovered with a setting of 10, the K20D with 6. At 3.3 stops up, the K10D couldn't pull back from clipping with any amount of recovery, while the K20D came clear at 16—not an extreme amount of Recovery. At +3.7 it blew through the right wall of the histogram.

So, even with nearly 50% more pixels, highlight retention is slightly improved. In addition, my real world shots are indicating that this test may underestimate the improvement. In the test, not only does the new camera reach a little higher, but it holds more data just before the cutoff. The older camera sort of slides into the clipping above +2.3 stops. This conforms to my impression that the highlights in real pictures are richer, improved more than the white card test indicates.

Noise
Now for the noise tests, second go-round. The K10D's noise performance up to ISO 400 is good enough that in walkabout shooting I make a practice of using the camera's auto ISO feature, limited to a range of 100-400. I've never had a picture ruined by excessive noise because the light demanded 400. Up to 400, I also don't see a real difference between the K10D and K20D—except that a 100% view of the new camera's files is more magnified on screen because of the higher pixel count. At 800, the judgment gets a little tricky, which calls for a digression.

The K20D has a new menu item that lets the user select one of four levels of high ISO noise reduction: Off, Weakest, Weak, and Strong. I shot a series at ISO 100 through 3200 using RAW+best quality JPEG. As near as I can tell by pixel peeping at 100%, the NR is entirely done by the software that makes the in-camera JPEG files, not hard-wired into the sensor. The differences are plain to see in the JPEGs, but I can see no change at all to the RAW files viewed in ACR—they all look like the JPEGs done at "Off." This is fine with me, because to me the JPEGs with NR look worse, not better. Any reduction in noise is more than offset by smearing of detail, and of the noise itself.

Both at 800 and 1600, the noise in the K20D RAW files viewed at 100% in ACR looks better to me than the older camera, though at 800 I would not say there is exactly "less" of it. When the two are compared, the K20D noise looks crisp and clean, while the K10D files at high ISO look, in comparison, as though they've had some smeary noise reduction done to them, even viewed in ACR. In the old days, there were films that had smeary, mushy grain and films (famously 35mm Tri-X and T-Max P3200) that had beautiful, tight, clean-edged grain. Good grain that people came to love—imagine Salgado's pictures without that grain! At least on screen, the K20D looks like it may have "good noise" at high ISO. The new camera's 800 files look better, and the 1600 files look a whole lot better, than the older camera. 3200 looks really coarse. These are first impressions that await actual print tests for confirmation, but I'm looking forward to printing some good pictures made in rotten light at 1600. A little bit of nice tight grit may be just the thing for "available darkness" shooting.

Liquor Store, Union City, Connecticut

Another shot from Sunday with a long range of tones held beautifully with just a little adjustment in ACR.

Next time, more on color and tone, and more on new features.

_______________________

Previously:
Pentax K20D Report Part I: Focus

_______________________

Carl

Carl's website 
Working Pictures
WPII

'Best Before 1995' by Ronald Jones

Ronald Jones, in Frieze magazine, has written a beautiful little essay on one of my longtime personal bêtes noire, relativism, in this case as it relates to art and art education.

"Best Before 1995," Part I

"Best Before 1995," Part II

Along the way, he quotes Bruno Latour giving a good and succinct definition of relativism: it's the idea "...that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on...." Jones amusingly notes that "Once institutionalized, relativism became an acquirable skill like typing or riding a bicycle—transferable knowledge reproduced at will." He rightly concludes that "It was never more than a methodology," adding, "one whose time has now passed. "

__________________

Mike (Thanks to David Emerick)

Rangefinder Follies

By Ctein

In various comments I've mentioned the problems inherent to mechanical rangefinder cameras. The complex connection between what you see in the rangefinder window and what you get on film is prone to errors. Most rangefinders aren't very precise. The few that are precise (like the Leicas) are rarely if ever accurate over the full range of focusing distances.

Even autofocus mechanisms have their flaws. My Fujica GA645 has two separate autofocus mechanisms, for near and far distances. The far distance focus is dead-on, but the camera consistently back-focuses by about 6 inches on near subjects. Fuji's repair center in New Jersey swears it checks out perfectly on their test jig. Now, when I photograph a near subject, I lean forward while focusing, press the shutter halfway to lock the focus, and lean back before pressing it all the way. Funky, but it works.

My friend Laurie Edison has been using one of the hard-bodied Fuji 645 rangefinders for many years. Those cameras are robust and reliable. A few years back, though, she started getting increasing numbers of out-of-focus photographs. It took us a while to be sure that there was an accuracy problem and that it wasn't just Laurie being sloppy. Eventually we became convinced there was a consistent back-focus problem. It appeared the camera was out of adjustment.

We tested this in a simple but effective manner. We sat down next to each other and I picked a brightly lit subject on the far side of the room that had very clear and contrasty edges. I focused and made careful note of the exact distance. Then I threw the lens out of focus, handed the camera to Laurie, and had her focus on the same point.

It took her quite a while to bring the superimposed rangefinder images into alignment. She kept hunting for the right setting. When she was finally satisfied that she had focused accurately, she handed the camera back to me. Her best focus distance was considerably (and repeatably) behind mine. She was having a lot of trouble aligning the superimposed images and that she was consistently back-focusing. There was nothing wrong with the camera.

Then I remembered something. Laurie had astigmatism, but she was not in the habit of using her glasses with the camera because she could see the rangefinder images sufficiently well without them, although it was a little blurry. Astigmatism doesn't just smear ones vision, it causes doubling of out-of-focus images. That's what was was messing up her focusing—the ghost images were creating a spurious and illusionary alignment in the rangefinder window.

New glasses with a better prescription for her astigmatism and a diopter lens for the eyepiece to let her see the image sharply with her glasses on solved the problem. She could once again focus fast, assuredly, and accurately.

So, the next time you think you may need to send your rangefinder in for costly repairs, first check to make sure you're not astigmatic.

______________________

Ctein

Focus!

Many years ago I researched the issue of focus. I read about all the various means of determining and setting focus on various types of cameras, focusing aids and how they work, and the issues affecting accuracy and repeatability. I have to admit that I don't remember all of the technical arcana, so if I wanted to explain it all, I would have to go research it again. But learning it once was an eye-opener. It turns out that although focusing a camera is almost universally seen by practicing photographers as easy to do, it's in fact not a trivial technical problem, if we adopt suitably high standards for accuracy. Almost always, what we're doing when we focus our cameras is setting approximate focus. It's only because we're usually focusing on complex, 3-dimensional subjects, and because we're granted considerable leeway by depth-of-field, that approximate focus is usually good enough.

Carl and I just went through an interesting exercise. He had prepared an illustrated addendum to his article showing how he determined and set the custom lens focus adjustment  on his K20D. The problem we had was that when he reduced the test files to web resolution, the fine distinction between in-focus lines and out-of-focus lines on the test chart literally disappeared. What he was seeing at full resolution in ACR was not possible to show at web resolution.

I noticed a different aspect of the same thing all those years ago when I did my research and tests on focus. The greater the resolution of the whole system, I found, the easier it was to detect exactly where the plane of focus was placed, and the more evident it became that objects just out of the d.o.f. were not in focus. Somewhat counter-intuitively, if I reduced the resolution of the whole system (for instance, by using faster, coarser-grained film and hand-holding the camera), it looked like more was in focus. All I was doing was making the highest levels of distinction between the plane of best focus and the closer zones of the d.o.f. disappear. To my eye, at least, this made most pictures look better, rather than worse.

It's easy to demonstrate the principle in Photoshop. Click on the picture above to bring up the larger version, and see if you can tell where the focus was placed.  Not easy, is it? That's because I've applied a liberal amount of Gaussian blur to the entire picture. To my eye, it looks like everything from Vietnam Inc. to maybe Leonard Freed is resolved pretty much the same, and it's not evident where the plane of best focus actually is (except that you might reasonably assume it's in the middle there somewhere).

In this sharpened version that was not blurred, it's much easier to tell where the plane of best focus is—approximately on The History of the Japanese Camera. In this version, it's possible to see that both New York Rises and Lewis Hine are slightly out of focus—something that's invisible in the top picture.

This demonstration doesn't quite make the point, simply because the entire top picture looks obviously blurry. But, in fact, the entire bottom picture is fairly low resolution—it's a small JPEG, 72 ppi, and the camera was handheld with the lens wide open. In it, I can't tell much difference in sharpness between History, Bruce Davidson Portraits, and Wright Morris (the pink book on the far side of History.) Make a really high resolution picture of this subject, and you might even be able to tell which side of the spine of History is more in focus!

When you've achieved enough resolution so that the "sharp parts" look subjectively sharp, then having more of the d.o.f. match the best apparent focus can make more of the picture look sharp. That's why small apertures often make pictures look subjectively sharper even though, in objective terms, diffraction is degrading the sharpness of everything in the frame.      

'Best practice'
But back to focus. Strictly speaking, all methods of focusing have pitfalls and potential for error, and all types of focusing aids have their characteristic limitations. That's even without taking into account the mechanical "slop" and the general imprecision of our devices (and other factors that affect apparent focus, such as film flatness or the flatness of field of our lenses). Once you add that in, it's fortunate indeed that only approximate focus is commonly required, because we'd be out of luck if we had to do better consistently!

As it was, I adopted one 'best practice' that I continue to observe habitually to this day: I don't use a lens's widest aperture at its closest focus distance. If I'm focused as close as the lens will go, I make sure to stop down at least somewhat, and if I'm using the widest aperture, I make sure I'm focused at least a little farther away than the lens's closest focus point. The reason is simple enough: there just aren't very many camera/lens combinations that are both precise enough and accurate enough to focus as close as they can go with the lens wide open. Assuming you'll get good focus in such situations just leads to frustration.

In the case of AF systems, consumer cameras, especially ones that are less than top-of-the-line models, are not terribly high-precision devices (they have to be pretty darned good, all things considered, but they're never perfect). There's a fair amount of slop in the design and construction that has to be overcome. But even so, most AF systems are "detuned" from their best theoretical performance. The reason is that the more accurate the AF and the finer the system's tolerance, the slower the system will achieve focus and the more it will hunt. If the tolerance is widened, speed increases and hunting decreases. The camera-makers know that the typical end-user is simply less aware of precise focus than he is of AF speed and hunting, so they compromise. In the best cameras, not only is the system itself better and more capable, but the balance between focus accuracy and AF speed is skewed more towards accuracy (despite which, the AF still has to be fast). That kind of performance, of course, comes at a cost.

___________________

Mike

Pentax K20D Report—Part I: Focus

By Carl Weese

Spring has arrived, my favorite time of the year, especially for color photography. This caused me to take a deep breath last week and decide to buy a K20D to expand my Pentax equipment set. I’ve recently had some print sales, big enlargements from K10D captures with the superb Pentax prime DA lenses, and I really wanted to see what a 46% increase in pixel count would do for such prints. The camera arrived Monday. We’ve had terrible weather all week—clear bright sunlight, blue skies, puffy white clouds—my least favorite shooting conditions. The good news is, this forced me to spend nearly three days doing purely objective technical tests before finally charging out into the field to try some real world pictures yesterday, despite the continuing pretty postcard weather.

In external appearance, the new camera could be the K10D 1.1. It looks so similar that the most obvious change is the welcome addition of a standard PC flash sync socket. But in terms of performance, the new camera is a lot more like version 5.0. There are so many improvements I’ll need several postings to list them, while so far I have not found a single “deprovement”—no changes I wish the engineers hadn’t made.

My first focus is, well, focus. Specifically AF performance. I hesitated several weeks before buying a K20D because the manufacturer’s literature states that the camera retains the K10D AF system. Since I found AF to be the K10D’s biggest weakness, this gave me pause. I’m happy to report that the AF is not the same, and all to the better. First, AF action with the lenses I’ve tried is faster, crisper. (Pentax may still say the AF is the same: I’m simply reporting my impression based on tens of thousands of exposures with the K10D and now 519 with a K20D.) AF accuracy is also improved. The K10D focus points were too much like broad patches for my preference: aim at a flower in front of a wall, and it would focus on the wall. Hold your hand out in front of the camera and point the AF patch at it and the focus will be perfect, but hold up just one finger and the focus will snap to the backgrounnd. Not a matter of back-focus, it was just blind to narrow objects that I would expect AF to recognize. The K20D consistently focuses on targets the K10D would miss.

Gate, Torrington, Connecticut

I shot three frames of this subject, de-focusing the lens between shots, and the AF, in single shot selective center spot, snapped onto the iron gate each time. The older camera would have invariably focused on the brick wall in back, requiring manual over-ride.

AF accuracy is further improved by a brilliant new feature: user-adjustable AF focus point correction. With the camera firmly mounted on a tripod, aimed at a focusing target (you can easily find one for download on the web) make several exposures, download to a computer and view at 100% magnification. If the focus is in front or behind the intended point, go into the camera’s menus and change the custom setting, then test again. Of five modern Pentax AF lenses I have handy, one required a hefty correction of +6 (out of a possible ten), one needed +2, another benefits from a tweak of +1, and two others are dead on the money as is. The camera recognizes the lens as you mount it and applies your custom correction factor. My understanding is that the camera recognizes the lens by type, not individual serial number so if, as in my case, the factor of +6 is set for my 21mm DA Limited, the same factor would be applied if I borrowed someone else’s 21, which would likely introduce an error. You can also set a factor for all lenses which in effect means a correction for the camera itself. Of course this feature is ripe for abuse. Careless or mistaken use of AF correction could easily ruin the performance of excellent equipment, so use with extreme caution. But oh boy, do I love this feature!

Speaking of quick and crisp, the new camera is rated for the same 3 fps sequence shooting speed as its predecessor, but the action feels faster and “tighter.” I almost never shoot sequences but I certainly want the shortest possible lag time from button push to shutter actuation. I don’t have equipment to measure this, but the new camera seems to release closer to NOW than the old one. It also helps when making a grab shot if the AF is fast and certain.

Heineken, Winsted, Connecticut

This is an example. I turned a corner, the delivery truck roared by, and I shot two frames, barely getting the camera to my eye. Auto focus, auto (program) exposure, just a little tweaking of the RAW capture in ACR.

Next time, changes brought about by the completely new, 14.6 MP CMOS sensor.

_______________________

Carl

Carl's website 
Working Pictures
WPII