martin_altmann

The same story (even worse) here in Chile: The price of a D70+18-70 (D70 as without the "s") has recently been lowered to CHP 959000, which is US$1800, before it war 1190000 ($2300) and 1290000 for the D70s version ($2500). That in a country with an average wage of 470000/month (US$900). However with the newer models this seems to ease a little. The D50+18-55 costs CHP 599000, so US$1100. Similar to the A100 from Sony and the newest DRebel. BTW. VAT is 19% here, and almost no duty since Chile has duty free trade agreements with almost every important country in the world, incl. USA, EU, China, South Corea, I'm not sure about Japan, however.

Well, consider your camera, or rather your lens to be a function projecting what it "sees" onto the focal plane, a.k.a film/chip. Even a non obstructed circular aperture still is an obstructed aperture as it has a limit, namely defined by its radius/diameter. Even those do have a diffraction pattern, in case of imaging a point source (i.e. a star or a far away lamp of some kind) it will show the point as a disk of a radius depending on the apertures radius and focal length and some rings around it. Why don't we see this normally? Simply because most camera objectives and our eyes do not have the resolution to show this effect, and in the case of an astrnomical telescope the atmostphere causes the images of stars to swell to a far larger "disks", than the diffraction disks. However you CAN see the diffraction disks and rings in the case of visibly obsering a star with a small telescope (the smaller the aperture the larger the diffraction pattern), especially in really calm moments, or also in the case of the HST - which doesn't have a atmosphere. Nowadays, the diffraction limit is becoming a nuisance in point and shoot cameras, which have tiny lenses adapted to their tiny chips, so that especially in the lowest focal lenght settings one woul;d see these effects at f/11 or lower (i.e. f/16 f/22 etc.) That is why these cams do not have settings beyond f/8 or f/11.

The size of the diffraction disk, a.k.a. the resolution of the lens/optics is given by:

d=1.22*f/D (d=diameter of diffraction (Airy) disk, f=focal length of lens, D=its diameter)

 

Now, as in your case, any additional object in the optical path introduces its own diffraction function, i.e. it alters the circular diffraction function - like the trees/branches in your photo.

In my opinion it is a diffraction effect caused by the branches and needles of the trees. One can clearly see that the patterns are strongest around branches/needles. Your lens may be clean, but your aperture certainly wasn't. The obstrcutions in the optical path caused these patterns. Given the complicated pattern of the obstruction itself and the background source it would actually be had to calculate the resulting diffraction patterns. But one can also see the effect on most astronomical images, where the brighter stars have (usually 4) spikes sticking out of them, the so called diffraction spikes, usually at angles of 45,135,225,315 degrees. These are caused by the secondary mirror or rather the struts holding it (images taken with a telephoto lens, a refractor or a telescope having a glass plate holding the secondary mirror (e.g. the popular Schmidt Cassegrains) do not have these spikes. Looking at your picture, this very much looks like this effect. The optical configuration is similar to that of a telescope doing an image of the sky, focus to infinity, nearby thin elements in the optical path - voila!

Dear Michael,

 

IRAF is a full blown professional astronomical software package, which can perform all kinds of things, virtually everything needed to get results from raw data as taken from the telescope - in fact it is probably the most used software by astronomers. The good news is, it can be obtained for free (www.iraf.noao.edu), the bad news is:

-it is a program from the 1970s and it behaves like one

-installation can be a pain

-only runs on UNIX based OSs, like linux (a debian package exists, which should make installation much easier), the various generic UNIXes, and MacOS. No Windows version available.

 

But once one has overcome these obstacles, IRAF can be quite useful, since it has features photo manipulation programs (such as GIMP,PS,...) usually lack, such as the centroiding of points, such as stars (one of the most (important tasks in astronomy) and the registration of images (i.e. making them fit). Since I've been doing that for years on astronomical data, I decided to try it on my digital images from the D70, and it worked - was a lot of work though. The aformentioned task "geotran" basically is the heart of the whole process. It calculates a transform of an image to a reference image (the trick is to choose one of the images, usually from the middle of the sequence as reference and to register the others to this image), which is accurate to (in my case here) less than 0.1 pixel (it accomodates for nearly everything, i.e. shifts, rotation, distortion, etc.). As an input geotran needs a list of (at least 5) coordinates of the reference image as well as a list of coordinates of the same objects for the image to be transformed. The task geotran then actually performs the transformation of the image. The coordinates of objects like stars can be derived by using a simple IRAF task like imexamine.

 

Short answer: yes Iraf is capable of doing that.

What about GIMP?

 

The Gnu Image Manipulation Tool, originally for Linux is a more or less full blown Image manipulation program, also available for Windows. If you're using Linux there is hardy a way to avoid GIMP anyway. And it is a nifty program which while not perfect can do a lot of things, with the also free ufraw plugin, it can also read NEF files. A good suggestion would be to give GIMP a try, it is absolutely free and licensed under the GPL, the Gnu Public License, see www.gimp.org

Get the Tokina. I have one and I love it. Additionally Tokina seems to have a better QC than e.g. SIGMA where it seems to be pure luck whether you get an orange or a lemon (in my definition, if a lemon is something bad, some other fruit must be good, I chose the orange). However if you also want to do 35 mm or FF photography, consider the Sigma 12-24 which unlike both the Nikon and the Tokina (and contenders) is desinged for FF. Keep in mind that no lens is optimal at the limits.

The main thing we need is self cleaning sensor arrays. Right now, I'm perfectly happy with DX, since I have lenses at my disposal that I didn't have, when shooting 35 mm, such as the Tokina 12-24, which corresponds to 18-36 in the FF world. Back then I only had a 24 mm prime as my widest angle, everything else being beyond my reach.

 

Apart from this I would really appreciate some anti-Theft measures (today being the 1 year anniversary of my first D70 being stolen, my new one is insured - in this country a D70 without the "s" with lens costs US$2000 - a Rebel XT $1000, same as a D50 (1100, incl 18-55), whatever that might be, remote controlled explosive devices, or remote shutoff, etc. or a locating signal, so that the police can track the stolen camera and put the bastard who stole it where he belongs, in Jail - and throw the keys away.

I have some questions concerning the cleaning of the D70 CCD chip. Mine is

currently showing some nasty dust specks, some from fibres several dozen pixels

long (so I'm not talking about almost indiscenrable specks, I'm not one of those

obsessive guys freaking out over every little speck). AFAIK the usual way would

be to clean using those swabs and cleaning liquid. Now, I'm living in Chile, so

I don't know whether they are available here at all, and if, where. Therefore my

questions are:

 

-Does anybody by chance know where in Chile (Santiago that is) I can obtain

these cleaning swabs and the according liquid?

 

-What other methods could I try? One possibility would be the following. I have

a pump to inflate a airmatress, which also has a deflating (i.e. sucking)

opening. While the suction is not very strong, I could hold it into the opening

(far enough from the Chip as not to damage it) with the mirror held in

maintenance position and try to suck away the (sucking) dust. Dust really sucks!

 

-Does anybody have experience with flatfielding out these specks? (Flatfield is

a white light image which records the varying sensitivity across the chip, quite

straightforward, when dealing with astronomical images, for photograhy, a

different ff for every aperture needs to be taken.) Is there any software that

is capable of flatfielding?

 

My second question refers to altitude: We are going on a tour leading us up to

altitudes of 5500 m a.s.l. Would I have to expect any problems with the camera?

I do not use Minidisk storage, these are known to malfunction above 3500 m. Upto

now my cam has been at an altitude of about 4000 m without problem.

I had my F401x busted back in 1996, it fell from its tripod onto solid concrete. Ended up paying a total of DM 510,- (about $300-400 at that time). However the sum was so high, since two items were damaged (apart from the $ being so low during those times), namely the lens and the body, each costing about the same amount of money to repair. The lens (the 35-70 3.3-4.5 (or whatever) kit lens) had a stuck zoom, and the body lost its flash and had other cracks, but was still working (the F401x doesn't have a LCD), so overall similar damage to what your D70 has suffered. The NIKON people told me the following (I was suggesting to leave the Flash unrepaired): The expensive thing is labour, once they touch the device they have to bill at least one hour of labour. So adding or leaving out stuff does not make sense. Every camera that has falen needs to be checked since the focal arrangement might have been altered by the fall, possibly causing front focus, back focud or even tilted focus. The camera came back repaired, cleaned, as did the lens - the zoom howevber is still somewhat stickier than it used to be. Since you have only one piece of equipment, I would expect a sum of about $150 for the repair. Maybe 200.

Well, i had a similar experience. While travelling in Patagonia (actually I happened during a lens change while visiting the fortress of Fuerte Bulnes) my D70's sensor accumulates a piece of fibre which showed as a shadow several 100 pixels long. Being without cleaning equipment I tried to shake the cam to make the (clearly visible) piece of fibre shake off. Nothing helped. Then we tried the hotel's hair blower, gently - didn;t work either. Final option was, taking a rounded piece of paper, gently poking it onto the piece of dust. That did the trick, dust gone, no trace of anything on the subsequent pictures. Chip is still remarkably clean (unlike my previous (now stolen D70 which was kind of a dust hog) I took over 1500 images on that vacation, the only other time the cam failed me was while looking at Glacier Perito Moreno and rain temporaily corrupted some circuitry (that went away later witout my interaction). So my advice would be. Small dust specs should be tolerated - you can't see them anyway! But these huge ones are a different story. Doing something not by the book such as John or myself did, might just save your vacation trip.

I recently puchased a Delkin DVD burnaway stand alone DVD burner to primarily

use while travelling, since it can back up digital images without the need of a

computer, i.e. an internet Cafe with UBS 1.1, slow computers and increasingly

high prices (as much as US$2.50 per CD - I mean your own CD). But I would alos

like to use it on my laptop computer which mainly runs under Linux (Debian). Up

to now I dsid not have success - does anyone know how to install this device?

Well, since there is no recall in South America, where I currently live, I contacted Nikon Europe where I spent some time around Xmas for family vacation - they agreed to send me the replacement first given that the time of my stay might be too short for the normal replacement routine. Indeed, when I arrived in Germany, I encountered an envelope with the replacement and in a seperate letter a padded envelope to send in the recalled item (all sent from/addressed to Baile Atha Cliath, aka Dublin/Ireland). I dutyfully sent them the faulty battery, just to receive an email a few day later that they had received the recalled battery and are now sending the replacement. I protested saying that I already have the replacement - but on the day I left, I found a EL-N3a in the post. Now I have a EL-N3e (which apparently is more intelligent than I am) and a EL-N3a. Since I've already told them that I already have a replacement, I suppose it is my good luck and their bad luck. But nonetheless everything went quite fast and nicely.

They say however that you'll receive the call-back envelope within 5-10 working days and another 5-10 working days after receiuving the called back item one will get the replacement. Thie means, It could easily take 3 1/2 weeks.

I had to replace my D70 during September/October (the old one was

stolen), now I would like to know if there is any way to put the image

counter of the new one to a similar value of the old D70? This way, I

won;'t have images with duplicate numbers, and am not prone to

accidentally overwriting one with the other (well they are stored on

CD-copies anyway, but...). I haven't found any hint how to manipulate

the counter in the manual.

I don't know how Asia is equipped with internet cafes and the like, but here in Chile they are a really viable option, since they exist even in the smallest hamlet in the outback. Last February I did a 2 1/2 week trip and ended up with a complete 25 pack of CDs written (2 copies per backup). DVDs are not so suited, since many places don't yet have DVD burning capabilities. And DVDs are more prone to failure. I had only one 1GB CF card with me. Yes it can be somewhat time consuming, so try to find fast places. Having a USB cable, or even better a card reader & USB helps. I took about 1,100 photos on that trip, storing them on CF only would have meant 7-8 1G CF cards, i.e. US$850, since I shoot RAW+BASIC on D70. The CD backup cost me about US$8,- for the CDs and typically US$5 per session, about 8-9 sessions , so about US$60 in total - that is less than even one 1GB CF card.

One of mine is also on the list, but I live in Chile, so how am I going to get a replacement (I can't even fill out the request form, since you need to put in a state)?

I would definitely get the Tokina 12-24. It really is a nice lens, equivalent of a 18-36 mm FF lens. Furthermore it is made of metal and has a very worthly feel and touch. The optics seem to be comparable to the 2x as expensive Nikon model, with people and reviewers favouring one or the other in roughly equal numbers. It is only 499 at B+H.

Remember that the battery itself loses charge with time. So I suppose that the drain in a switched off camera mostly comes from this. There is a small demand of power to drive the LCD showing the no of exposures left, and some other basic keep alive functions, but the intrinsic battery loss of charge is probably dominant.

I second all who said Tokina, it is a great lens, with a lot of metal, no cheapo thing. Accordign to some tests, it is evewn better than the Nikon. Only drawback (like the Nikon): it is not FF-compatible, the SIGMA is.

Can one also transfer a MACK warranty from one piece of equipment to another of the same class? In my case from my D70 that has been stolen to an D70/D70s that I still have to buy (I still have 4 years left of the 5 year warranty). I've contacted Mack's on this, but apart from an automated acknowledgement of recipet there was no reply yet.

I totally agree with Scott's last posting. Especially now, in the days of rapid advancements of DSLRs spending too much on a body is a waste of money. And you never know when you have to replace it as I have not thought two weeks ago that I'll have to buy a new D70, and somebody else has one for free now - mine+ my 24 mm 2.8f that I loved so much (meaning that I actuallt worked for sulch this month)! In this dangerous world you can lose your investment quicker and sooner than you might anticipate. Even if nothing happens to your camera (and I duely hope so) it will end up as a fully functional paper weight within a couple of years.

 

@Dave: that a D70 without a proper charger is a paperweight is gooood news for me, since that means that the thief and his client can't use the camera. I'll sell my charger for US$2,500 to them :-)

Is it possible to make Nikon NOT repair a BGLOD on a D70, with or without cost? My, D70 which was stolen a week ago has No. 315XXXX, so being a rather early model, is probably & hopefully more likely to suffer from this effect (until the theft, it was not having any sign of failure). While I do not exspect to recover the camera this way, I don't want that bloody SOB of a thief or the SOB who bought the camera have much benefit of it.

That's not what I meant. My initial question has two entirely independant issues, the first being whether I should inform Mack's asap that my camera has been stolen, and the second concerning selling the battery charger for which I no longer have any use, to minimise the financial loss. I suppose one can sell it for US$50,- or here for US$ 100.

Correction: The Mack's guarantee has slightly more than 4 years left (I don't think anybody o has owned a D70 for more than 3 years :-))

Related to the theft that I suffered last Friday, some questions:

 

The stolen D70 has a Mack's 5 year guarantee, which has slightly more

than one year left. According to the card that you recieve upon buying

such a guarantee it is transferable for a US$15 fee. Since I hopefully

will be able to buy a new camera next month in the US (here in Chile

they are insanely expensive, D70 (without "s") + lens (which I don't

need) for US$2224), that what I will do, tranfer my old guarantee. Now

my question is: Should I inform Mack's rightaway about the theft, or

only when I have the new camera (hope the old one gets the BGLOD soon)?

 

Then concerning the battery charger (which I of course still have):

1. It is still part of my greatest hope to somehow get hold of the

stolen camera, since it can't be operated without batteries, and these

can't be recharged without the generic charger, which the buyer of the

stolen equipment will have to buy. Therefore I informed the Nikon

service centre yesterday. But eventually I would like to sell the

battery charger to minimise my losses. Since my new camera is probably

going to be an D70s which to my knowledge has a different layout of

batteries, I would have no use for it anyway. So here my question is:

howmuch could I charge for the charger (I would take the average sum

stated here and multiply it with 2, to arrive at Chilean prices)?

Sorry, last posting was incomplete.

 

...I would like to hear how other photo.net members insure their equipment. I mean in comparison of what could have happened this was moderate. Imagen I would have had a D2X, or a full frame Canon model, and a really expensive Nikon or Canon L glass. Fortunately my Tokina 12-24 and my Nikon zoom where not affected. Is there any insurance that is viable (meaning that it is not as exspensive as having the stuff stolen in the first place)?