mark liddell

Wow what a deal. In addition to the 35-70 he SB24s go for a fair bit these days as they are great for strobist type work.

At 200mm 1/25 is hit and miss and 1/50 was the lowest consistantly reliable speeds in my handholding tests.

 

Given its bulk I'm very glad the VR on this lens is good!

I have one on order so the variation with the tests mansurov posted worries me. I'll be sure to test it to make sure I have a good one since the lens is almost the same cost as the 70-200 VII!

 

Try doing some tests at infinity to eliminate focusing issues.

I guess it's a big ask for a 1.4 lens wide open to be up to the 70-200 at 2.8. The D version has corners that were almust unsuable at 1.4

 

You may find the test on mans urovs interesting; in a comparision of the 85 against the 70-200 at 2.8, the 85 easily wins. (I can't post a link due to photo.net bloacking it!? Google search as one word).

I have actually started to use my lee bellows lens hood with it from my LF camera! This lens has served me well but I've just lost too many shots now due to flare especially since I liek to shoot backlit.

Interesting. This lens flares like anything and it's veiling flare ruining the image totally and the prime reason I'm looking at the 24-70.

I have one. If you are shooting with off camera flash it is def worth having rather than chimping for flash/ambient ratio but otherwise the camera meter does the job. If you get one be sure to calibrate it to your camera. My D700 was 0.7 of a stop off from the meter so I had to dial in compensation to the 358.

1. quality is not important, memories are

For snapshots maybe but not for serious photography

 

2. I loved APS

All aps does is crop which you can do at the printing stage

No, the SB800 is

As the sun goes down the ambient light will drop quickly and your problem will be to little right rather than too much light. No ND filter needed.

 

Use your flash off camera, set the power and drop your shutter speed as the sun sets to get the sky how you want it. Your call over whether you gel the flash or not. Once you can no longer handhold start upping your iso and dropping your flash power accordingly.

Trading consumer variable aperture zooms for pro lenses? Do it.

 

I rented the 70-200 VR II recently and was blown away. Handheld shots at 1/40 at 200mm and amazing AF performance. Made me also lust for the 24-70 to finally replace my 35-70 f/2.8

<p><i>"The D700 can produce outstanding 20" x 30" prints, however I would not use the default ISO 200. I have better results with mine by using LO1.0 (ISO 100)."</i></p><br>

<p>

The base ISO of the D700 is 200 which is where an sensor works best, shooting at LO0.1 is exactly the same as overexposing by 1 stop and pulling it back in post, it's no a real ISO setting since the warning in the manual about lost dynamic range.</p>

 

<p>Shoot it at 200 unless you NEED a slower shutter speed for some reason and have no ND filters</p>

You'll be ok unless it's very bright. With hotshoe flashes you just have to work around the limitations and it's nice to work quick and light but as soon as you are doubling and tripling them up it is more cost effective to get some more powerful strobes and deal with the weight.

<p>You need a good sharpening workflow to get the most out of the files and a high quality upressing algorthm in yoru software.<br>

Everyone has different standards for large prints, for me the D700 will not get close to a 20x30 that stands up to critical viewing but shooting film I would not enlarge 6x7 slides to that either. Could you get an acceptable looking print to view from a distance on a wall? Certainly.<br>

Prints of that size are in the realm of stitching, medium format digital or 4x5 for me. I routinely stitch 8-9 D700 files for landscape shots.</p>

Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AF-D

 

Put any other money into lighting

Both my 105mm 2.8 macro afd and 85mm 1.4 afd focus dead on wide open with 0 fine tune. I would get the lens and camera checked out.

It definitely does help black hair, you can gel it with a CTO gel too. To me hair light never really looks natural outside unless you use the sun as backlight and shoot onto a dark background.

www.strobist.blogspot.com

As sharp as any prime 35-50mm even wide open but performance at the corners drops off at 60-70mm. Flares like you wouldn't believe, and it's image ruining veiling flare too.

 

Great lens for the money and well built but I'd take the new 24-70 if I had thousands to drop on a lens.

Gitzo 3 series legs and an acratech/RRS/Kirk head.

I have the 35-70 2.8 and 85 1.4D. The 35-70 bokeh isn't too good, the 85 1.4 is in a different league

ISO 25 would be useless since both flash and ambient exposure is affected by it. 1/500th would be great since it would halve the flash power I needed to use.

Does anyone know if the Nikon version due to be released later this year will allow manual adjustment of flash power from the camera's commander menu like CLS?

“other photographer asks Bride - is it okay if I tag along ? Bride says of course.”

 

At this point I would have said to the couple “we have x minutes to get all the formal photographs for your wedding album it’s going to be very tight and I want to do the best job possible, I’ll start once Amateur Friend has got her pictures”.

 

Bride can then be the one to decide if she is happy having their photo time consumed with her amateur friend’s pics or not and if there is no time left it was her decision and you still get paid.

My preference with natural light is to use strong backlighting as advocated by Cliff Mautner and particularly Susan Stripling; there are so many great natural light shots on her blog it's well worth looking at, I'm not sure on the policy here for linking images so I'll just link her blog: www.susanstriplingblog.com particularly this set www.susanstriplingblog.com/index.cfm?StartRow=16. She uses no flash outdoors.

 

The trick to this lighting is to get a backlit situation and expose for the face but with a dark background to set it against all while keeping yourself in shadow to avoid flare. If you use a light background and you expose for the face you will just get epic blowout. Using this technique you can shoot in some really hard mid-day sun and get great shots without any nasty shadows.