The Online Photographer

The Nikon D700: The New 400

You digital people are so lucky. And what do I mean by "digital people"? Michael Reichmann mentioned, in the course of his new Panasonic G1 review, that he encounters photographers these days who never shot film. So do I. It's an amazing if inevitable development in the hobby. Anyway, I often don't think you digital people have any idea how lucky you are.

I've been mulling over a number of things these days. First, I've been mulling over my final thoughts on the Pentax K20D. And I've been mulling over some holistic thoughts about camera development, which is proceeding interestingly as usual. And some thoughts about B&W.

Meanwhile, "camera testing weather" is just about over here in Wisconsin. We had a lovely snowfall this afternoon—great cottony clumps of flakes drifting down from the sky, some seemingly an inch in diameter. Naturally, a picture doesn't do it justice, but just as naturally that didn't stop me from trying:

You should have seen these things. Seriously, I don't think I've ever seen bigger snowflakes. Maybe as big, but not bigger. Not quite the size of canned hams.

Ultimately, I suspect the image quality (IQ) of the K20D is better than that of the Nikon D700, as I shall try to demonstrate in due course. The Pentax has somewhat higher resolution and better detail; it has slightly tastier, richer color than I've so far eked out of the Nikon. But that's only if you're able to use the K20D within its limitations—meaning, at normal sensitivities. That's a big "if," turns out. Where the D700 just obliterates the K20D—and every other digital camera I've ever used, save the D3—is at high ISO's.

The higher, the more better.

I use the K20D about like I use my old Konica-Minolta 7D: freely up to ISO 800, and 1600 when needed, tolerating an acceptable but obvious IQ hit. Those speeds seem luxurious to me. They cover most picture-taking situations easily. They're no hardship, certainly, for someone who grew up on film.

I was able to shoot the snowflake picture at 1/800th sec. at a middle aperture of ƒ/5.6, which is pretty good. IQ is good, too: the D700 is even picking up the snowflakes against the gray sky. I think you can see that even in the online JPEG if you click on the picture to see the larger version. Can you see that? I can see it easily in the full file. I don't know, but I don't think I ever saw film do that under similar conditions.

Even on screen, you have to magnify D700 files considerably to see noise at many sensitivities. What I noticed was that at many speeds, you see pixels before you see noise.

Pixels show up at a definite screen size: at 100% they're not obvious, and at 200% they are.

Which got me to thinking. (It's always dangerous when I try to do that.) Examining D700 files on the monitor at 100%, you cannot see noise at, say, ISO 400. I did some shots at ISO 5000, and at 100% you can clearly see the noise in those. Hmm (cogs turning): What that means is that there's some speed that's the highest speed at which you'll see pixels onscreen before you see noise onscreen. (Does this have any practical meaning? I honestly don't know. The weather's bad, and I'm just dorking around today. Dump-de-dum-dum.) So, just for fun, I went looking for what that speed is.

I did speed-brackets of a number of shots. I think this hits the magic number:

The knives always fall into the disposal. Oh, and sorry about these dreadful "just a test shot" pictures. I suppose we all do that, right? Especially at this time of year, here, with wet snow falling under leaden skies. There's no good light anywhere. Hey, at least I didn't show you the self-portrait I took in the bathroom mirror, so maybe you're luckier than you think.

Anyway, I can sort of see noise—barely—in this picture at 100%. Here's a screen shot from ACR, which you should be seeing at 100% after you click on it to enlarge it:

I think you're seeing just a little noise in this. Kind of hard to tell. There seems to be a little color in that stainless steel that's not stainless-steel color. Bear in mind this is raw straight out of the camera, with no sharpening and no noise reduction. And this is worst-case—in other test shots, the noise is even less obvious.

So what was it shot at? 3200. (<—incredulous voice.)

Pleased as punch
You have to put this in per-spec-tive. I remember when I was young and I'd talk to old guys who'd say things like, "You don't know how lucky you are, having ASA-64-speed Kodachrome. In my day, the speed of Kodachrome was 12!" Well, I'm dating myself, but what the hell, it's my turn to be the old guy: I still remember the days when 400-speed color neg films got decent. Late '80s, early '90s, that was, after Fuji came along and lit a fire under Kodak's corporate butt and the two giants started competing. At that time, I feel confident in saying, we would have been pleased as punch with performance as good as the above from 35mm 400-speed film.

The D700 is achieving quality at least as good with three stops less light.

There's nothing magical about the D700's IQ at normal speeds. It's perfectly good, but I'm reasonably certain you could get IQ as good from any other 12-MP camera if you used them both optimally. (Even some digicams, if the SBR—subject brightness range—isn't too great for the wee sensor.)

But the higher the ISO, the more the D700 will pull away from what you're used to.   

Now go back to the snowflake picture. Despite the dark day, I was able to shoot at 1/800th sec. at ƒ/5.6 by shooting at ISO 2500. Dump-de-dum.

The 7D and K20D would both be well into "we give up" territory at ISO 2500, image-quality-wise. The D700 is just reaching cruising speed. You probably wouldn't do this, but I honestly think that if you wanted to, you could use 2500 as your normal, everyday setting with this camera. For everything.

3200. It's the new 400. And some of you probably just don't realize how amazing that is.

_____________________

Mike

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Featured Comment from Andy Munro (UK): "Mike, The D700 and D3 have hit a real sweet spot for me (Wedding Photographer). I am amazed (actually continually amazed every shoot) to see detail where there used to be an orangey black mush. Now not only is the noise held in check, the colour is there...fabulous. I just hope they don't chase pixels and lose this 'black cat in a coal cellar' ability."

Featured Comment by Joe Sawicki: "Having done photography in both ages, I really get a kick out of seeing the comments about Camera X or Y where someone insists that the inability to capture at ISO (insert absurd number here) noise free, makes the camera completely unacceptable. Hey, I'm an engineer (can't spell geek without an EE), and I get the appeal of specsmanship, but digital SLRs are years past the point of being unacceptable."

Beast of Burden Beware

The comments in the "Carrying Style" post, below, came in about like I expected—a few pros shaking their heads over what amateurs consider "heavy" (photographers are beasts of burden, and some pros do schlep far more equipment than many readers might realize—see my favorite picture of a photographer here, and if you have any idea how to get in touch with the guy who took that—the mysterious and elusive "S Smith"—please—seriously—let me know)—and, of course, several people thoughtfully addressed the potentially serious health issues that can result.

Work-related injury is serious stuff. I remember a blacksmith I knew in Vermont who had such serious back problems that it could take him twenty minutes to stand upright again after shoeing a horse. He was a deeply traditional Newt (i.e., native Vermonter), but he practiced yoga every day—because it was good for his back.

Not all photographers develop physical problems as a result of carrying heavy equipment awkwardly for too many years, but many do. Personally, I developed a sensitivity in my neck that at one point seemed like it might be permanent, although it's gotten better in recent years. Before the UpStrap came along, I also had a distinct case of "shoulder hunch" that another commenter mentioned—the tendency to hold one shoulder higher in order to keep a camera strap from slipping off of it. As a result, I've become almost fanatical about lightweight equipment, and about carrying methods. That's not just preference—it's a health issue.

Gunslinger
From this picture on the cover of my book Lenses and the Light-Tight Box (I can't find the picture file, and note that the book is no longer available), you can see my all-time favorite camera setup: An Olympus OM-4T with a Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2, and a Contax strap with a contoured shoulder pad. Note the spring clips on the strap: when I was concentrating on shooting, I'd unclip the strap and stick it under my belt so it was out of the way, and hold the camera in my hand. The large rings were for getting the strap back on quickly: I could just stick the whole spring clip through the ring and pull back on it. No fumbling.

Obviously this is a long way from a pro setup, but I "wore" the camera every day—put it on in the morning, and took it off at night, like my shirt (in imitation of David Vestal). So it had to be comfortable and light when it was on my shoulder.

I really liked those Contax straps—I bought five of them and still have a couple. Now, however, I'd choose the UpStrap RF, the UpStrap with the smaller shoulder pad. I can't say if the UpStrap is the best strap if you carry your camera around your neck—maybe an OpTech would be better in that case—but years of carrying too much equipment around my neck, as I say, has left me unable to carry cameras that way. I can't carry any camera around my neck for any length of time without pain. For carrying a camera slung from one shoulder, the UpStrap RF is far and away the best I've ever used—it stays up there admirably; you just don't have to worry about it.

I always thought that the best "camera strap" would be a simple setup similar to suspenders. They'd attach to your belt or pants in back and in front, just like suspenders, but they'd have extra straps sewn on each side at about shoulder level that held the camera. This would put the weight of the camera equally on both shoulders but keep it entirely off your neck. I've never tried it, though, so maybe it wouldn't work all that well—maybe the weight of the camera pulling up on your pants in the back would give you a permanent wedgie. I'm not the guy to make it into a product in any case (I just get ideas, I don't act on them).

As for carrying tons of equipment around, I'm just not that kind of photographer. It's not always a disadvantage. Some people carry lots of equipment so as to be ready for anything, and this helps them get certain pictures. But traveling light and staying unobtrusive can also help you get certain pictures, ones you might not be able to get if you advertised "photographer approaching" from a distance.

Burdens
But back to the subject—newer and younger photographers would be well advised to consider this issue carefully. Carrying a heavy camera bag or several cameras draped around your neck might seem easy enough when you're young and strong, but burdening your body with awkward and uneven weights on a regular basis can do orthopedic damage over the long run. Beware.

____________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Janne: "The extreme fascination with 'pro' equipment among photography hobbyists sort of irks me. Not only does it propagate the idea that it's the equipment more than the users' skill that makes a good picture; it leads people to actually get worse equipment than they could have.

"My workplace has had some media attention the last couple of years, and we've had a steady stream of photographers and video people come by. One thing it has hit home is that professional photographers do not need better gear than amateurs, they need different gear. As far as I have seen, the equipment they use is made to last long enough so it can be deducted; it is easily serviceable or replaceable at a moments notice (no oddball choices); or it can be rented at a gear rental shops around the world. Size and weight, and purchase cost, just about never comes into it.

"We had one arts photographer come in to do a quick shoot. He was traveling light and brought only one camera, a Mamiya 7. For all that, he still had two or three bags full of stuff, including a strobe and power pack and a big, sturdy tripod that the camera never left. No problem for him because 'traveling light' still meant traveling with an assistant who could be counted on to pack and unpack, carry stuff, check reservations and so on.

"But we amateurs don't have assistants and we are often not primarily photographing so our gear really does need to be very small and light. And as 'small and light' usually means no tripod for us it means amateur gear needs to work well handheld, unlike pro gear which will normally live on a tripod. The extreme case is digital MF. There is no amateur market for it, not because of the cost (how much does a motorcycle, or RV, or golf club membership set you back?), but because it is so obviously unsuitable for amateur use. Digital backs assume you're shooting tethered and can use a dedicated computer with their own, expensive, software on it, so no stabilizer, no high-iso performance, lousy handholdability. But other pro gear is similarly unsuitable for amateurs, it's just not as blindingly obvious."

Featured Comment by Stevierose: "I have to say that I am in total agreement about being conscious of maintaining good camera carrying ergonomics (I mean, I have actually had cervical spine fusion surgery), but I think that, for me, the problem is more the camera than the strap. The problem, as I see it, is: so far there is no digital equivalent of an Olympus OM4t and 40mm lens pictured on Mike's book cover. This combination is: light, rugged, very well thought out (the highlight and shadow spot metering function is brilliant), has good optics, and (here is the kicker) it has a big, clear, beautiful viewfinder with interchangeable screens. I can carry an OM4t around all day on any kind of strap.

"I have purchased a number of DSLR cameras in the hopes that they were even sort of close to this kind of outfit, and, I'm telling you, they ain't out there. My latest foray in this direction was the Olympus e420/25mm prime outfit. But the viewfinder is a tiny little tunnel compared to the OM4t, it is nowhere near as intuitive a photo maker, and the lens is no great shakes. It is small and you can carry it all day. The new Panasonic G1 is being heralded as the inheritor of this tradition, but it has an EVF (albeit improved). Pentax makes excellent prime lenses and fairly intuitive camera bodies, but they are pretty heavy in my hands. So, I am still waiting. And, even though I am way into digital now, I can't bring myself to sell my old Olympus 4t."

Ah, That's Better

Out my front door about an hour ago, with the Nikon D700 and 35mm ƒ/2 (which just got here).

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Carl Weese for the lens loan)

Nikon D3X is Here

I don't even know if I should bother to mention this, since you've probably seen it elsewhere by now, but the D3X was leaked today. Ironically, it was a blogger, Seb Rogers, who broke the news.

Now a lot of Nikonophiles are going to see just how good the A900 is.... :-)

By the bye, since the story broke, nikonrumors has been intermittently down, and apparently almost all of Nikon's European sites were down yesterday.

____________________

Mike

It's Our Birthday

Today is significant in a number of ways. It's leftovers-day in the U.S.; it's so-called "Black (?) Friday," allegedly the #1 retail shopping day of the year but actually not—generally it ranks 5th or 6th or so, most of the days in the week right before Christmas beating it; and it's the official start of Christmas-Music Season, an annual blight upon my existence. I don't know why retailers think playing Christmas music nonstop will put anyone in the mood to part with cash, unless they simply want to drive them mercilessly to finish up, pay, and leave, vacating the aisles for the next throng. It's not that I have anything against Christmas music, in principle; it's just that I prefer to listen to it sparingly, when I choose to. I won't go into a Menards because of that horrible jingle they inflict upon their customers at water-torture intervals, and I have gotten so leery of the gratuitous assault of Christmas music that venturing into chain stores over the next month takes on the character of high-stepping through a minefield, not that I should make light of minefields, a tragic problem in many parts of the world. Anyway, I even stay out of bookstores in December, and it takes a lot to keep me out of bookstores.

Oh, and today is our birthday—we are three. The Online Photographer first booted up on November 28th, 2005. This is the 2,242nd post since then, and we have averaged just about 10 comments per post over that time and received some 13,054,835 visits not counting today's.

All that, and we're apparently not done yet.

Cheers,

Mike

Featured Comment by Dave Kee: "Congrats! I haven't read all 2,242 posts yet, but I am up to May, 2008. I can't wait to find out who our new president will be."

Nikon 24-120mm Review

On Thanksgiving I completed a block of shooting with the D700 and a lens that is officially called the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 24–120mm ƒ/3.5–5.6G IF-ED, and I must say I am impressed. Although not in a good way. In fact, I am even somewhat excited.

For a number of years I made a sort of side-hobby of appreciating camera lenses. ("Appreciating"...sure, let's say it that way.) I took an interest in learning how to see various aberrations, learning to explore how various lenses behave, learning how to accept the "gifts"—pictures, I mean—of good lenses, learning how to work around the inevitable weaknesses of others.

But in recent years, a sort of pall has been cast over my little personal hobby. First there was computerized design. That sort of sucked the eccentricity out of old and odd designs, raising the standard across the board and bleaching certain lenses of their formerly particularized character. Then came sophisticated, modernized methods of quality control: this went impressively far towards removing sample variation as a significant element of lens choice and tended to "bunch" all lenses near the top of the performance band. Then came good digital sensors, which make it possible to make certain corrections (at least superficially, which to the eye is nearly as good as actually) in software, as opposed to being integral to the lens. Along the way came modern materials science, which substituted low-cost, lighter materials for previously high-cost, harder-to-work, heavier materials, with not only little detriment in actual performance but actually, in some cases, improvements. Lastly there was Chinese and other low-cost, high-value loci of manufacture, which made sophisticated products marketable at ever-lower prices of admission.

All good things, to be sure. But the result has been a sort of gradual subsiding of my enthusiasm for lenses. The bottom line was that in recent years all lenses had become pretty good, and some rather ordinary lenses had become really good. Zooms, formerly "guilty until proven innocent," had become quite good in many cases—in a few cases achieving really impressive heights; even some "budget" kit zooms were quite competent, with minimal weaknesses that in many cases were easy enough to identify and work around. Furthermore, my own taste in lenses began to become highly particularized and somewhat oddball, without much conformance to universally accepted norms of performance that everybody could understand. And I began to wonder if perhaps there was much point any more in seeking out really good lenses.

The coup de grace seemed to come in 2006, when I bought a used Konica-Minolta 7D that came with a modest zoom lens—a lens in which I initially had zero interest. The lens was branded as a Minolta, but in fact it was designed by Tamron and made at Tamron's facility in China. It was light, small, fast, and reasonably priced. Here was a lens that all my experience told me would be sub-par; and yet it was not only good, it was very good, at least on that particular camera with that particular (reduced-size) sensor. I had intended to get rid of it right away, but I've been using it ever since.

A couple of random samples from the quite fine Tamron 28–75mm ƒ/2.8—the lower one one of my experiments in desaturation.

It might seem odd for a self-described lens nut to be complaining that lenses are getting too good, but let's face it: a world in which all lenses were technically perfect—clinical, synthetic, characterless—would be a more boring world.

I even used a "premium" prime (fixed-focal-length) lens recently that was decidedly old-fashioned in that it showed clear enough evidence of a number of traditional wide-angle weaknesses: the Zeiss ZK/ZF 28mm ƒ/2. That lens shows mild but noticeable amounts of traditional wide-angle distortion, has a clear tendency to favor the center over the corners, and has a rather extreme amount of curvature of field. And yet, for all that, it is still a highly pleasing lens, in a subjective sort of way: it has superb contrast, excellent resistance to flare, and excellent color transmission. The pictures it makes are quite nice, characterful but rich-looking. Although I've learned that the curvature of field is bothersome to some users, I still don't think it's a poor lens.

POS
So then along comes the VR Zoom-Nikkor 24–120mm, sent to me by Nikon USA to review with the D700. This is a lens of thoroughly modern specification, ranging from ultra-wide-angle to quite far into the telephoto range. It's reasonably fast, and impressively small. It has vibration-reduction (a.k.a. IS). It's quite inexpensive for all that. It looks the business. It's a Nikkor. And if all lenses are indeed "good enough" these days, then how bad could it be?

Well, here's the thing: it's a piece of shit. Granted, I was shooting in very low light, at apertures that will "stress" even good lenses. But despite its fancy specs, this is for all intents and purposes a perfect throwback to the days when even good zooms couldn't aspire to the performance of ordinary garden-variety primes. Its performance is for all the world like an early-'80s mid-level zoom—smack dab in the middle of the era in which zooms earned—and deserved—their still-lingering bad reputation. It has flagrant amounts of linear distortion not only at its wide setting but well into the middle range, and apparent perspective distortion even near the middle of the frame(!). The D700 could hardly focus the thing—I got more out-of-focus shots than I have with any AF lens in years—yet even so, the situation hardly improves when it does manage to execute this basic operation and get the subject in focus, because its sharpness is lackluster. At 120mm, I don't think the thing gets sharp. At least, not without stopping down further than I was able to. The deterioration in performance toward the corners is often marked—and not just at the extreme corners, either. Color transmission borders on sucky (I know this from having recently used the 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 on the D3).

Whoops! I haven't seen distortion this bad in many a moon. Understandable for a cheap zoom at its extreme wide setting of 24mm, you say? Perhaps, except this was at 55mm!! Ouch!!!

I let my friend Witold use the D700 for a while, and he put one of his Nikkor lenses from his D60 on it. The D700 still had trouble focusing in the very low light, but when I click through my pictures it is immediately obvious when the lens switch occurs, because the optical quality of the results takes a jump upwards.

In brief, for a full-frame 24–120mm lens, this is a decent 35–105mm APS-C lens.

There are a few good things about it, a few things it does better than an early-'80s zoom, besides being smaller and with a much better range. But so what? It might even fool some less experienced photographers into thinking it's okay. But that's no excuse. This is a very inexpensive lens that is not worth half of what it costs. If you innocently purchased one of these and are not lucky enough to be using it on a DX sensor, try to get your money back if you possibly can. Otherwise, stop down and avoid the extremes of the zoom range, even though they're probably why you bought the thing in the first place. For my part, I will strongly suggest to my contact at Nikon that this is not an appropriate lens to send out with the D700 for review. Every dollar Nikon makes on this thing will sap three dollars' worth out of the company's hard-earned reputation for optical excellence. And I will shoot not so much as one more frame with this Coke-bottle-bottom—it goes back in its box today. Now. Even though that will sideline the D700 for two or three days. The D700 deserves more of a fair shake than this lens will allow.

The Nikon VR 24–120mm: take a pass on this one.

Oh, and one more thing: the VR doesn't even work very well. It works, but it's the least effective image stabilizing I've yet experienced.

Buying advice? Oh yes. Tempted though ye may be by its specs and handy size, give this one a pass.

Reason still to be a connoisseur
And yet, I'm sort of pleased all the same. Lenses are getting really good in general, it's true. And there is perhaps less reason than ever before to spend excessive amounts of money on lenses that are deliberately designed and made to be fine...more's the pity. But not all lenses are "good enough"—there are still some real, honest-to-gawd dogs out there.

I'm weird, I know, but I find that reassuring.

___________________

Mike

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Happy Thanksgiving

A very small Thanksgiving poem:

-

Eat and be grateful
For every plateful.

Best regards,

TOP's massive editorial staff (urp)

Random Excellence: Casper Hedberg

Casper Hedberg, From the story "Violence in Kenya," via VervePhoto.

Born in 1983, Casper Hedberg grew up in a small village in the southern part of Sweden. By the age of 14 he took a darkroom class and got hooked on photography. Casper's professional career started in 2005 when he began working as a full time photographer. A year later he got his Bachelor of Photojournalism at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall. Today he lives in Stockholm and does assignments for major Swedish newspapers and magazines both in Sweden and abroad. Most of all Casper enjoys reporting about social issues around the world.

_________________________

Mike (Thanks t0 Charlie Didrickson)

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Featured Comment by jchristian: "Wow, I keep coming back to this shot. There's so much motion, and it's disorienting & a bit frightening. Love it."

Ansel Adams 'Archival Replicas'

Ansel Adams, Golden Gate Headlands, 1950

Thought you'd want to know, Dept.: the Ansel Adams Gallery, in Yosemite Valley, in conjunction with the Adams family and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, have decided to issue a new kind of Adams print. Up till now, if you wanted an Ansel Adams print, you had three choices: original prints, modern prints limited to 8x10 inches in size, and offset posters. Now there's a fourth alternative: 12-ink archival inkjets in sizes up to 30x38".

The big advantage? Price. The new "Archival Replicas"—seven are being offered initially, with more to follow—sell for $129 to $849 (mounted and matted). "Technology has advanced to the point that we're now able to make reproductions of my grandfather's originals to extraordinarily exacting standards," says Matthew Adams. "We believe these are the best large-format reproductions of Ansel's work yet made."

So how good are they really? I haven't seen one. Sounds promising, though.

Ansel Adams, Jeffrey Pine, 1940

________________________

Mike

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The Career of a Collection

Polaroid Corporation in its heyday was well known for supporting the work and activities of photographers, and cultivated a large and varied photography collection that was known far and wide. Apparently at least parts of that collection are now among the assets of beleaguered ex-tycoon Tom Petters and his bankrupt Petters Group Worldwide, which acquired the remnants of Polaroid Corp. three years ago.

Let's hope somebody's looking after the work properly, and that it finds a suitable and more stable home soon.

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Hudson Leighton)

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ADDENDUM:

The Polaroid Book: Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography

(Thanks to Simon)

Carrying Style

To continue the discussion about camera size....

In an earlier post the other day, reader Edwin Liu commented that how you carry the D3 has an impact on how comfortable you'll be with it:

"Oh, on the shoot to carry ratio—just one hint: do not carry the D3 round your neck!! Yes, it's like a chainsaw if you do. The camera was designed to be carried in your hand(s), not round your neck. I usually carry the D3 as a walk-around camera in my hands and I never feel it. Trust me, it is so well designed for your hands that it feels like part of yourself. When you are not shooting, carry the camera in a backpack, not in a shoulder bag."

Edwin's D3

I think Edwin's on to something here: how you carry a camera has a lot to do with your perception of the size and weight it should be. The D3 with a large zoom is at an uncomfortable transition point—just about too big for a neckstrap. It really does demand another kind of carrying strategy, like Edwin says. It's true that relatively more weight is more comfortable in a backpack, and I know from experience that carrying a camera in the hand all the time is in some ways more comfortable than having it dangling from a strap digging into your neck: I carried a heavy medium-format camera around D.C. for six months and never even owned a strap for it; it was always in one hand. Never bothered me. Of course it does tend to limit what else you can carry, and what else you do with your hands. But it's a good way to make a relatively heavy camera tolerable.

There's probably a "break" or transition point between that method of carrying and carrying with straps. My habit is to carry a camera on a strap hung from one shoulder, which militates for a certain size camera as being most comfortable and handy (and a certain size of lens, too—big lenses make cameras the wrong shape for carrying the camera from one shoulder, unless the lens is long enough to make the whole shebang hang downwards).

But there's another "break" in size relative to carrying style: it's when you go from carrying a camera on a strap, to putting the camera in your pocket. That's why there's relatively a lot of discussion surrounding the size of cameras like the Canon G10, and the Canonet I pictured here yesterday: they're certainly small when hung on a neckstrap, but they're large for a pocket (I suspect the same will prove true of the Panasonic G1). So they're sort of at yet another uncomfortable transition point. A truly pocketable camera needs to be smaller still. 

Same thing goes for really big cameras, come to think of it. Various famous large-format photographers transport 8x10 cameras on big tripods by using...an assistant! So, basically, they've got Sherpas. (Reminds me of one of my favorite Richard Avedon quotes—paraphrasing—"I don't need a motor drive; I've got a motorized assistant.") I think it's safe to say that if you carry your camera via Sherpa, you don't need to worry about its weight—an 8x10 on an extended tripod becomes perfectly portable.

___________________

Mike

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Inexpensive Carl Weese Prints

As an experiment, our friend Carl Weese is offering for sale very low-cost prints of any of the pictures featured on his blog, Working Pictures. You can read more about the ongoing offer on WP.

Carl has been a photographer, graphic designer and writer for 40 years, and has taught workshops all over the country. He is best known for his ultra-large-format platinum/palladium work (I'm still trying to get him to offer a low-cost platinum print for our readers, à la the Ctein dye transfer print offer last month. Maybe next Spring—I'll keep nagging). He's written many posts for TOP, including the very useful Paper Towel Test, which lets you know how many stops above middle gray your DSLR is capable of recording—a more meaningful metric of dynamic range than simply the overall number of stops you can record, since, often, simply "exposing to the right" results in depressed middle values.

Head over to Working Pictures sometime and take a look around. Even if you're not going to buy one, try this as an exercise in delectation: if you did have to choose just one, which one would it be?

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Michael Poster, Camerawork Gallery: "Carl had an exhibit in our gallery in Scranton not long ago. The prints he showed there were Epson inkjet. I can certainly vouch for the beauty of the images and the quality of the prints."

DxO Will Answer Your Questions

DxO has issued a press release to photographic websites this morning containing two major announcements. First, "as early as next week," it will add measurement results for many new cameras—including some medium-format cameras.

Second, it has instituted a new "Questions & Answers" section at dxomark.com. This will be an ongoing service, but, naturally, some of the most basic and pressing questions have been answered in the first go-round (such as, "How is DxOMark Sensor computed? What is the formula?"). If you've been following the new website and have questions about how the evaluations are arrived at, you can get the answers straight from DxO.

Here are a couple of samples from the first round:

"How can I know if two cameras are noticeably different?"
Consider a digital gain of one f-stop, or similarly underexposing 1 EV at capture and then adding 1 EV at RAW conversion. This operation leads to a loss of 1 in Dynamic Range, 1.5 in Color Sensitivity, and 1 in log2 (Low-Light ISO), corresponding to a loss of 15 in DxOMark Sensor. Therefore, you can consider that a 15-point difference on the DxOMark Sensor scale is roughly equivalent to a difference of 1 f-stop, and that a difference of 5 is equivalent to 1/3 f-stop. DxO Mark Sensor differences below 5 can be considered as not noticeable.

"Should I interpret DxOMark Sensor results depending on the way I use a camera?"
Before evaluating a camera, you should indeed define your own photographic use-cases. The print size that you typically prefer will determine the minimal resolution that you need. Once you know your required resolution, then you can use DxOMark Sensor to look at the best digital camera within the resolution category that you have selected. If your main use case is to view pictures on screen at 1:1 scaling, then you are less concerned with resolution (so long as your screen has fewer pixels than your camera), which means that you can use the "Screen" measurement that dxomark.com provides.

Many more answers are provided at the website. As a gratuitous editorial comment, I'd just like to say that DxO is really to be applauded for providing this very valuable website and service—a perfect complement to sites that test cameras as integrated devices and don't attempt to isolate the quality of the sensor.

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Ctein: "I am in geek heaven."

Nice, Wet, and Blue-Green

I don't want to harp on camera size to the point of making everyone sick of the subject (too late already?), but I do think it's a significant factor in how satisfied you'll be with any given model. A predictor of happiness, even.

To reiterate: camera size is a matter of preference. There's no right and wrong, and I don't mean to suggest or imply that there is. It's up to you to decide for yourself. I like smaller cameras myself, but I'm advocating, not arguing.

Ansel Adams's habitual rejoinder to the question "What camera do you use?" (a question he must have gotten incessantly) was, "The biggest one I can carry!" And that's probably still a good rule of thumb—buy the biggest camera, not that you can carry, but that you will carry—the biggest one you'll want to deal with, the biggest one you'll feel comfortable with—and you'll probably be on the right track.

This first comparison is almost a little silly—but it's what got me started here, because these two cameras happened to land near each other on the kitchen table one afternoon. It's John Camp's Nikon D3 and AF-S Nikkor 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 (which started its journey home today—thanks again, John) next to the Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-M 50mm ƒ/1.4 that my son uses for his high school photography classes.

The comparison's an unfair one, even given the disparity in vintage—the Pentax was a consumer model, and the Nikon has capabilities that the designers of the smaller camera would hardly have dreamed of. A fairer comparison would be to an LX with a motor drive attached, but my LX is currently not presentable due to a broken prism (don't ask). The ME Super was famous in its day for being miniature—Olympus had made small SLRs all the rage in the early '70s, and then Pentax did them one better. (Nikon made small cameras too, but, similar to GM making small cars at the time, its heart wasn't really in it.) The smaller camera above isn't inferior to the newer one in every single way, however. Its lens is faster, and, oddly enough, the vintage Pentax's viewfinder is considerably larger and at least as bright as the Nikon's, although its coverage is not as good.

The size differential between this D3 outfit and the D700 with the AF-S VR 24–120mm ƒ/3.5–5.6G is still considerable. The smaller camera of these two is decidedly closer to my own personal happiness threshold (again, no value judgment for others implied). Even with the largish lens, it's very ergonomic and comfortable in the hand. (Carl is sending me his AF-Nikkor 35mm ƒ/2 to try on the D700, too, which will probably make me like it even more.)

"Bragging rights" is actually a perfectly good reason to buy any particular camera, I think. I'm having a bit of trouble imagining any other rational, objective reasons why any ordinary non-professional would possibly need the D3 over the D700, but one reason is that some guys simply like to own the biggest, fanciest, fastest, most capable, and most expensive of anything—and I don't think there's a thing wrong with that. Photography's a hobby, a pasttime, a pursuit, a passion—why wouldn't you buy the camera you really want, as long as it doesn't antagonize your spouse or come out of your family's grocery budget? The fact that you might not really need it isn't in itself a reason not to get something. Even if it doesn't make the most sense. Still, the D700 is a much more logical choice for the huge majority of photography enthusiasts, and, I imagine, even some kinds of pros.

Next, here's the D700 outfit alongside a Pentax K20D with a "normal-sized" (i.e., non-pancake) prime lens, in this case the DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited. The K20D is my current personal standard for the highly technical designation "juuuuust right" in terms of size and weight. It's comfortable both on the shoulder and in the hand.   

Finally, just for fun, here's the K20D outfit next to an old Canon Canonet QL-17. The Canon rangefinder was a "compact" in its day, but it's still quite a bit larger and heavier than the average pocket digicam of today (and, actually, not that much smaller than the ME Super in the top picture). I'm sorry I don't have one of those—a small digicam, I mean—on hand to compare to the Canonet in turn—we could keep going downward in these size comparisons like one of those nifty charts that compares the relative sizes of moons, planets, the sun, and bigger stars (I know where I come down in that size comparison too—I'll take a nice, wet, blue-green planet about 8,000 miles in diameter any day. When something's the "right" size, you just kinda know it).

_____________________

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jeffrey Glass: "Mike, Do you have access to a Hasselblad or Bronica SQ or similar medium-format camera? With any decent lens, it would be interesting to set it beside the D3 to add to your size comparison, especially since there is some reason to think the two are close to each other in terms of resolution and image quality."

Mike replies: Jeffrey, the D3 really did go back to John this afternoon—this is the best I can do for you (D700 and Bronica SQ-A).

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I also agree. I got the D3 two weeks after it came out, and three weeks before one of those "trips of a lifetime" things—I was embedded with an assault helicopter unit in Iraq (as a writer, but I also wanted to take the best possible high-ISO camera with me.) When the D700 came out, I felt a bit swindled. I'd paid a lot more for a much bigger, heavier, and in my estimation, less desirable camera. When I was flying in Iraq, I had to carry body armor at ~30 lbs and a helmet. The three huge Nikon zooms and the D3 didn't make life any easier. (Though they made some terrific twilight shots.)

"As Mike said, Nikon's heart might not be in a small camera—they've always gone for "the most." But I think they really need to get serious about smaller ones: they would be well-served to shrink even the D700, and then equip it with three pro-level ƒ/4 zooms. The sensor in the D3/D700 is good enough at high ISOs that it'd be worthwhile giving up one stop on the zoom to get smaller lenses. Also, I'm a fairly large guy, and if the body/lens combinations are a burden for me, they must really be a problem for all those 110-pound female PJs you see around.

"Just as gamers tended to push computer development, I think PJs push camera development—they always want the most for the most extreme conditions. But the D3, and the 1DsIII, border on the ridiculous."

Blog Notes

I know I promised not to mention anything about our affiliate links more than once a month, but this is more in the nature of apprising you about a policy change. From now on, after every third or fourth post the links will just be added at the end of the post, as in the post below this one.

The reason is that something like 6k readers, give or take, read us through full feeds on feed readers, so they don't see the ads or links here on the actual website. It's been suggested that I should add advertisements to the feeds, and a smart guy could do that. But I'm just a writer, and I have finished trying. Done. Given up. Please don't write offering to help; I don't intend to spend even one more minute thinking about it. I can't get it done, and that's that. I accept my incompetence and fate.

I can't get the new eMusic Download Manager to work properly either, and sometimes it's a very good thing I don't keep firearms in the house. While I am at it, I hate the new Firefox. It's clear that for v.3 they hired all the unemployed Vista engineers that Microsoft fired.

Anyway, if the links at the end of posts annoy you, please ignore 'em. I can only do what I can only do.

_________________

Mike

P.S. If you were watching football last night, aren't we smart up here in Wisconsin? Did we make the brainy move, or what? Unloaded that Brett Favre guy in the nick of time. That old guy can't do anything any more, and the new guy is capable of putting 29 points up on the scoreboard on any given Monday. How great is that.

Our coach and general manager are looking like geniuses to us right about now, that's for sure. Maybe they should both be called "Jerry."*

*After "the Jerrys," if you don't get the reference, Reinsdorf and Krause, the blithering pea-brained idiots who dismantled the Jackson/Jordan Bulls. The Jerrys didn't have one whole brain between them.**

**I hope neither of them are readers.

P.S. Despite my crabby comments above—forgive me—I have to admit that even before he retired, I was getting pretty sick of Favre's annual "Show me you love me" shenanigans. Every year it was the same damn thing—was he going to retire? Wasn't he? Would he please come back for one more year pretty pretty please? The wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth when there was a chance he'd retire and then the hosannas and ringing of church bells when he'd magnanimously decide to return. We had gone through at least five years of it up here. So then he finally retires and of course the Packers have to put in place alternative plans. Then he decides to UN-retire at the last minute and he expects the Packers to un-make all their new plans. I don't blame the Packers for the situation, I blame Brett. After all, nobody forced him to retire. If he'd decided he wanted to come back to the Packers, the door would have been open for sure. It was his decision. All the Packers did was abide by it. Watching us make the Saints look like the Giants does tend to make a guy a bit sore, but I wish Mr. Favre well in New York and, being magnanimous myself, I won't even predict he'll throw four interceptions when the Jets play in the Championship game. Now I'd better shut up or my house will get pelted with green and yellow eggs.

L-L's Anti-Depression Contest

Occasionally, Michael Reichmann at The Luminous-Landscape can't get the camera companies to send him cameras to test, so he just buys them at retail. Now he's giving away two such test cameras—the Nikon D90 and Canon XSi—in L-L's "December Anti-Depression Contest." They've been used for reviews, but are otherwise as new. Just buy anything (or simply register) at L-L's online store before December 31st, and you're automatically entered. The drawing will be held on January 1st and the cameras FedEx'd to the winners anywhere in the world.

Speaking of L-L, I'm still patiently awaiting Michael's review of the Panasonic G1, the first Micro 4/3 camera. Meanwhile, Mark Goldstein's review is now online at photographyblog.com.

Here at the extensive TOP review laboratories, the D3 is about to be dispatched homeward, and I've commenced using the D700 and 24–120 VR lens. Only one brief, judicious, and evenhanded comment thus far: Holy crap what a nice camera. I'm supposed to find fault with this beauty? I'll do my duty, but I suspect it's going to be like driving a Ferrari California and then bitching about the styling. Sometimes you should just relax and enjoy nice things.

__________________

Mike

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Quote o' the Day

"Passion is the thing you can't control, by definition...it controls the person, not vice versa."

-                                          —Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog

Oxford Project Video

Now available—The CBS "Sunday Morning" video segment about Peter Feldstein's Oxford Project. (There's a 15-second ad at the beginning.) Or watch it on the CBS website.

___________________________

Mike (Thanks to Stan B.)

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Data Mining for Dummies

By Ctein

When you're shopping for a camera, you want to know how that particular model performs. Trend lines and averages are useful for winning bar bets or figuring out where the industry might be going. They're a very bad way to buy a camera. People here are smart enough not to buy a camera based solely on technical paper specs, right? Well, deciding that a camera is or isn't for you based entirely on a trend line or the average performance of cameras in its class is even worse. You're not even basing your decision on the paper specs for that specific camera but how some hypothetical camera of that general class might perform, if it performed like the average of all the cameras that came before it. Does that make sense?!

What you should be looking at is not averages and trends, but scatter. What you're really interested in is how individual models may differ from that average. If the scatter is very small, than the average or trend is a good indicator. If the scatter is large, it isn't.

Back when cameras moved from six megapixels to eight megapixels (and from 8 MP to ten) I warned people that the performance of cameras varied enough from model to model that the best of the six megapixel cameras were going to resolve comparably to the worst of the eight megapixel cameras. Sure, on average eight resolved better than six, but the average was of no help in deciding whether to buy a particular model.

I still read  frequent comments in these pages from readers who pronounce that a camera with some spec  (megapixels, sensor size, pixel count, bit depth, you name it) is ipso facto inferior to a camera with a different spec solely because of some average performance indicator. That's the same mistake. As I said, it may win bar bets, but it's not a way of ensuring that you're buying the camera that's best for you.

Let's take a look at a couple of the graphs on DxOmark to further illustrate what I'm talking about:

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image001.gif

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image002.gif

Both of these graphs show trends in noise and pixel count. Note how shallow the trends are compared to the scatter of the individual points (camera models). Even within a single manufacturing year, the variations in camera specs are greater than the trends over four or five years. This year's camera may not only be no better than last year's, it may be worse than one released several years earlier.

Since both plots used introduction date, you can match up pixel counts with noise between them. Sometimes there's a good correlation; sometimes it's really lousy. For example, in the first half of 2007, there is a very nice match between more pixels and worse noise. On the other hand, three cameras introduced in the first half of 2004, with a threefold difference in pixel count, all have essentially the same noise level.

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image003.gif

The third graph normalizes everything to pixel pitch, which is the new fave metric. And, yes, the data clusters more tightly, but there are still variations of several dB from the average. In fact, if one ignores the two very poorly performing cameras in the early years, there's no obvious trend at all; it's pretty much a flat line with any given model varying by a couple of dB. While useful for analyzing trends, it won't tell you which particular camera model to buy.

As the folks at DxO said, "Another thing to notice is that for a given release year, the dispersion across cameras is of approximately the same magnitude as the improvement over the past 5 years. This means that ...the differences among current DLSRs can be larger than the overall technology gain over the past five years."

They also note, later on, that Canon, on average, has the best pixel performance, but the single best performing full frame DSLR model happens to be a Nikon.

That's it for today's sermon. Go and spend your money wisely!

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Ctein

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Chops

Smash

PJ's realize that it's not enough to have your chops down, you've also got to keep your chops up. That is, it's not enough to have shooting skills; you've got to keep them honed, too—keep in practice.

My chops, never great, are not in good shape lately. I've been feeling like a bumbler with a camera in my hands.

"Chops" is a term that comes from music—it's a slang term meaning "the technical skill with which a jazz or rock musician performs." That meaning exports to shooting skills and camera-handling, definitely.

One thing I'm learning lately is that dogs are really hard to shoot. I think they might even be harder than kids. And I used to think kids were the toughest subject to shoot candids of.

Here's how it went with Smash the pug, above: 1. He pauses from running maniacally all over the place. 2. I kneel, thinking, hmm, maybe I can get off a shot or two before he takes off again. 3. First shot, he's got his head down. 4. A second later he raises his head to look at me—probably thinking, whoa, what's this? That human's kneeling. 5. He leaps at me. 6. With a furry ball of pug flying at me through the air like a guided missile, I jerk the (expensive, borrowed) camera out of the way just in time to prevent it from being slobbered.

The shot you see was taken at "4," which lasted, oh, about 7/8ths of a second. I'm just guessing at that. Could've been less.

Anyway, it's a static shot. Doesn't look all that exciting. Not so special. And yet, kind of hard to get! At least for an overweight man of indeterminate middle age who hasn't done any assignment shooting since Clinton was President. In the cold. (Man, was it cold.)

Old Schatzie needed his coat, that's how cold it was

Here's another mistake. Well, this one isn't a mistake, but the three shots that preceded it were. I shot a quick sequence of five grab shots of this dachshund in the park after asking its owner's permission. Frame #4 didn't turn out too badly, so I'm not complaining. But I've gotten very used to shooting with smaller sensors, so in the first three shots, the dachsie's eyes are in focus and his nose isn't. What was up with that? Just that I forgot I was shooting with a larger sensor! I've gotten used to the better d.o.f. of smaller sensors. So I stopped down a bit more for the last two frames. Duh. Hint: any time you're shooting a human subject and have to excuse yourself, take the camera away from your eye, and fiddle with the controls while your subject waits on you, your chops are piss-po.

But note how the D3 has preserved, on the dog's face, the weak golden light from the setting late-Fall sun. That was just how it looked.

You know how studio guys always look at models' eyes with loupes to see what the light setup was? If you look closely at the dachshund's left eye, you can see how far above the horizon the sun was.

As you can see, the sun is right on the treeline, about to sneak off below the horizon.

My friend Steve Rosenblum got his copy of Sam Abell's The Life of a Photograph the other day and wrote to tell me about a review of one of Sam's workshops that Glen Johnson posted over at Photo.net. There's a lot of wisdom in Glen's essay—I recommend it. Glen reports that one thing Sam told the workshop participants was that "when a professional changes from one brand to another, the consensus is that you lose a year getting used to the new system." That made me feel a little better—I've used four different cameras in the past five and a half weeks. The time I've had with each one hasn't been long enough even to learn all its features, much less master it. Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

Do read Glen's piece. It's worth it.

This next one is a mistake I have no excuse for. It's just a plain old mistake. (I'm sure you never do that.) Here's the picture as it came out of the camera:

Why so bad? I had left the camera on spot-metering a few minutes earlier, purely by oversight. I got away with a few shots prior to this one, thanks to dumb luck, but in this case the spot meter happened to fall on the black blouse of the woman in the middle (my cousin Liz)...which meant my overall exposure was, what, three stops off?

D'oh!

I assumed it was a total loss, and I was annoyed enough at myself that I remember thinking, that's it, no more camera testing—I just have to use one camera long enough so I can really get used to it, really learn it inside-out, and get some chops back.

But look how well it corrected:

This is not the same frame—it's the next frame, of three—but it was exposed identically to the picture above. It doesn't look quite as good as if I had exposed it properly in the first place, but it came back amazingly well. It appears that the camera—this is the Sony A900—has just gobs of headroom for a digital camera. I don't think I've used any digital camera that can recover this much.

I may not have much in the way of chops these days, but hey, at least I learn stuff from my mistakes.

...And learn. And learn...(sigh).

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Mike

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