chuck

$300 is not bad at all. I dropped a 24-120 from one foot sideways onto rather bumpy rock. The impact cracked the housing for the VR and M/A switch. Everything worked just fine. Nikon charged me $400 to repair the switch housing.

 

However, when I got the lens back, it seems Nikon replaces the entire lens barrel, not the the switch housing. The body of the lens is clearly new. But they did not just replace the entire lens as I briefly hoped. The lens mount wear shows it was the still the original lens.

Does the new Z bodies have mechanical shutters? Are they compatible with current and recent flashes? Specifically SB-800 of which I have 3?

I am trying to do time lapse sunset photos on autoexposure aperture priority so the sequence tracks changing ambient light. However, you can see a noticeable exposure change from one frame to the next in the sequence whenever the camera makes a 1/3 stop aperture change. The result is the time lapse has a distinct strobe effect.

 

Can either D600 or D810 be set to do stepless adjustments instead of 1/3 stop adjustments?

I hope the new camera with adopter will actuate mechical aperture lenses. It is probably tempting to provide an all electronic interface.

I wasn’t planning on pointing the camera at the sun. I was going to start at twilight and then capture the gradual illumination of the city lights in the evening, or the alpenglow On the Eastern face of the Sierras prior to sunrise

i am interested in taking time lapse videos at approximately 1 frame/second over 30 minutes - 1 hour of sunrise or,sunset. Is there a way to,do this on the D600 or D810 that doesn’t require cycling the mechanical shutter 1800 - 3600 times?

I plan to take sunset photos with Nikon D810 and intervalometer. Is there Anyway to combine these photos into a video?

An acquaintance with the Park Service posed the following question:

 

“...... One of the requirements is photography of about 1200 items in the collection that the Park Service doesn’t currently have good digital photographs of. I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction of a method of adding data to a JPG file. We will be capturing the images as RAW (NEF since the camera is a NIKON D750) and JPG. The customer’s requirement is Tiff and JPG. We need to batch convert the RAW files to Tiff. That part is easy enough, but we also need to add the object’s accession number and a date to the JPG. The end result needs to look like this.

 

 

I need to add the black rectangle with the object name and data. Are there any tools available that would let us add the data we need to the digital file’s metadata then extract it out and put it in the JPG in a batch process. Can we do it in real time with a laptop connected to the camera? Are we stuck with doing that manually one photo at a time in Photoshop or something”

 

Can anyone help?

<p>I had it for over a year. I probably don't absolutely need to replace the switch cover, but the damage still irritates me. Perhaps after a few days the urge to replace the damaged part will wane.</p>

<p>This weekend I accidentally dropped the 24-120 f/4 from a height of bout 12 inches onto the top of a coarse masonry wall. The lens still functions perfectly fine and image appears un-degraded. But the plastic casing around the 3 sliding switches on the left side of the lens is cracked because the lens apparently impacted on that point. There does not appear to be any external screws that would allow the switch casing to be easily removed from the outside. It looks like significant disassembly of the lens might be required to remove the switch casing from inside. So I am hesitate to try to get a used parts only lens off of ebay and replace the damaged casing myself.<br>

Any suggestions where I should send the lens for repair and any adjustment that might be needed?<br>

I am currently in Northern Virginia.</p>

Thanks. Any recommendation for a astrophotography stacking software for Mac?

Can Lightroom do automatic registration and stacking of astronomy photos?

<p>In 1992, Nikon said it was discontinuing the 105mm f/1.8 AIS without any replacement because it was impossible to make a autofocus version of this lens as the electrical contacts on the back of the lens requires the rear element to be too small. Now Nikon just released a 105mm f/1.4 AF-s. I am curious what optical advancement made this possible. </p>

<p>Also, if Nikon can make a 105mm f/1.4 AFS, does that imply a 50mm f/1.2 or f/1.0 also ought to be possible with the lens mount restriction?</p>

<p>I am looking at full frame fisheye primarily because I want around 180 degree of coverage that can be post processed to resemble a rectilinear view. For example, an image of the Milky way spanning 18 degrees like an arch. A circular fisheye might capture the whole hemisphere of the sky, but does not provide much opportunity for providing an image that mixes terrestrial foreground with the sky.</p>

 

Why should full frame fish eyes be softer on the edges than circular fish eyes? Fullframe fisheye so at least cuts off the extreme edge of the image circle, so what remains as the edge should be sharper? No?

 

I suppose decent sharpness at f/2.8 depends on what I mean by descent. The edges of the 16mm ais I have is so soft at f/2.8 that you can clearly see the mushiness even in the optical view finder. At f/8 the edges are sharper, but still very soft when viewed on an iPad

screen. Stars near the edge look like comets or nebulas.

 

What I consider decent if for stars near the edge to at least be more or less star like.

I need a full frame fisheye for night sky photograph. The criteria is good sharpness across the field at large aperture, say f/2.8. Tried

16mm f/2.8 AI-s. Found edge sharpness highly unsatisfactory down to F/8. Any recommendations?

I am surprised by the comments regarding 200-500 and 80-400. I have both, and I find that at the at the extreme long

end, examined at pixel level, the 200-500 easily outperform the 80-400 in sharpness.

<p>I can definitely say at f/2.8 my 16/2.8 AIS is nowhere near as sharp at the corners as the shots illustrated in the Nikongear.net page above. The edges for my lens are so soft at f/2.8 that they look conspicuously soft and mushy in the view finder and on the camera back LCD monitor. I probably have a bad sample.</p>

 

What would be the best fullframe fisheye option for Nikon?

<p>Hmmm, that's a possibility. What is the expected of focal field for a fisheye? Is it extremely concave or convex? I assumed it was intended to be somewhat flat like most lenses.<br>

Also, since I plan to use this lens for night sky photography, it would be a major problem if when the center is focused on infinity, the edges are focused nowhere near infinity.</p>

 

<p>I just got a second hand 16mm f/2.8 AIS lens. The lens has a rear mounted filter installed. I took some exploratory pictures with. At f/2.8, the center sharpness was great, but the peripheral sharpness is disappointing to say the least. It is so unsharp that it looks quite soft and fuzzy even on the camera's rear LCD display. At f/11, the edge sharpens up quite a lot, but only compared to f/2.8. It is still quite soft and showing lots of radial chromatic aberration is looked at closely.<br>

Is this normal for this lens? </p>

<p>Tech improvements in other areas may be slowing, but in ISO sensitivity it is still going pretty fast. even low end D3400 now has twice the high ISO speed of D810. D5 has 10 times the ISO speed of D810. For those interested in astrophotography, this is a important improvement.</p>

<p>I was under the impression the actual implementation of Canon, Nikon, Sigma, and Tamron versions of piezoelectric vibration motors were quite different in order for each to avoid the patents of others that came before it. </p>

<p>Wouldn't there be a problem with parallax when stitching together image shot through different lenses?<br>

I am still not clear on what Nikon hope to accomplish with this?</p>

<p>Does the built in flash on the D700 also blow out the exposure? If so, the camera's TTL circuits is probably bad. If not, try a different flash on the shoe.</p>