Country Road at High Noon

Just a typical country road in the Carolina Piedmont--except that thisone was actually in an incorporated town, but on the "other side ofthe tracks," literally. It was shot with an inexpensive butwell-performing Canon Digital Rebel (but no slouch at 18 mp) combinedwith a refurbished inexpensive zoom lens stopped down to f/8. Ithink that they did pretty well, considering the harsh light of themiddle of the day. Comments welcome.

 

--Lannie

This picture was shot from almost exactly the same spot as this one.

 

One was shot with a Canon T2i on a sunny day, the other with a Nikon D90 on a rainy day.

 

--Lannie

 

 

Here is a 100 percent crop from the original file, near the bottom right.

 

The detail visible in the crop indicates what can be done with modest equipment, provided that the lens is stopped down.  (The MTF curve wide open for this lens is not good, but at f/8 it looks pretty good to my non-expert eye.  As always, of course, the proof is in the pudding.)

 

--Lannie

Just for the record, the MTF chart looks pretty good for this lens at the 135mm end.  It does not look all that great at the 28mm end, which is where this shot was made.  Of course, since this was used on a 1.6x crop sensor camera, the drop-off on the curves is a bit misleading, since the periphery (where the curves drop off so badly) was cropped out by the smaller sensor.  The f/8 curve is actually pretty good at 28mm when one takes the crop factor into consideration.

 

I should caution, however, that before the 100 percent crop section was taken out, the file was cropped from the right side to move from 3:2 to 4:3--and so this really was not quite from the extreme bottom right corner of the original file, although it was pretty close.

 

--Lannie

Looks like the 'road to nowhere'! 

On my screen, it looks like the  Nikon shot is sharper and has a bit better color.  It could just be the  difference in lighting and rain though.

 

Actually, Diane, this was shot between Main St. and U.S. 70 in Cleveland--and U.S. 70 is not far ahead, once one gets through this low place.

 

It is hard to compare the two shots.  The light was so horrific the day I shot the Canon.  It was literally about midday.  The Canon propensity toward cooler hues is obvious enough, but the Canon resolved more detail by virtue of the 18-megapixel sensor.  Check out the in-line crop above at 100 percent--and that was taken pretty close to the bottom right corner.

 

--Lannie