davidgarth

I sold my 70-200 f2.8 VRI and replaced it with the new f4 VRII and have been very happy I did. I was satisfied with the performance of the

2.8 lens when I was shooting DX but when I started shooting FX I found the sharpness at 200mm away from the center unacceptable to

me. The new f4 is much sharper than my old lens. The weight and size reduction is a great bonus. It's 1.5 pounds lighter and that makes

a huge difference.

I have never used NX before. It doesn't seem to allow much tweaking of the conversion of RAW to jpeg, things like white balance and

exposure. Or have I missed something that's in the program?

I downloaded the newest version on View NX2 and it works ok so far with Lion. I'd rather use Adobe Camera Raw, but

this solution will work in the interim until Adobe does an update. Thanks to all for your suggestions.

I just bought a Nikon D5100 to replace my D80 as lightweight back-up body. I'm actually quite happy with it.

 

My problem is that I haven't been able to find software to deal with D5100 RAW files that is compatible with Mac OSX Lion. The View

NX that came with the camera won't work with Lion and hasn't been updated. My Photoshop camera raw wont upgrade with Lion.

Aperture works with Lion but isn't my converter of choice.

 

Any suggestions?

<p>>>Whatever Nikon or Canon does, one thing is for sure..Their decisions are driven by profits; not necessarily what (we) want or need.</p>

<p>This statement doesn't make sense. Profits come from selling cameras. Selling cameras comes from meeting the customers wants and needs. </p>

<p>Aqua Pac also makes an inexpensive soft plastic underwater SLR "housing" that's waterproof down to about ten feet. I have one that I've used with a D80. With a 12-24 it just barely slides in; once in the bag camera is quite usable. I used it in the Galapagos down just a few feet snorkeling and it worked well. It would be great for white water rafting. Make sure you have the camera securely fastened to your life vest and not around your neck.</p>

<p>I don't want to start a "full frame vs cropped sensor" debate. They both have their place. The D300 and the 17-55 will yield excellent, professional quality wedding pictures in the hands of a competent photographer. I laugh when I read stuff like "I dislike small sensor cams except for vacation and hikes and quick pics." My D300 pictures have been published in National Geographic Traveler and National Geographic Adventure and lots of other places without any complaints about quality. Lots of "reduced sensor" images are used in all kinds of professional situations. For God's sake, I shot weddings for years with ISO 160 medium format negative film, and got good results, and now people say they can't do it with ISO 1600?</p>

The 500mm f4p with a TC14 teleconverter is your best price/value point if you're good at manual focusing. This combo

is still light enough to carry without a Sherpa, and with good technique you will get sharp results in good light (f5.6,

effective f8) There is no good inexpensive autofocus alternative, IMO.

I can't help myself--I just have to chime in here.

 

I'm a professional with almost 40 year of experience; before I switched to digital in 2002, much of it was with transparency film. I now shoot RAW+Jpeg most of the time.

 

There are good personal reasons to shoot just either one or shoot both. It certainly is not an amateur vs. professional thing. It depends on the importance of the final image, the difficulty of the lighting, and one's personal workflow. I shoot for publication, so even though I shoot thousands of pictures, I only need to process a few hundred "money" shots a year, so the time on each image is certainly worth it for me. Sometimes I might spent several hours on one image, but if it's for a publication cover that I'm getting several thousand dollars for, it's a good use of my time. If I shot weddings and needed to process thousands of final images, this wouldn't be practical. Every professional and amateur situation is different.

 

To the soccer photographer who's never heard of a pro sports photographer that shoots RAW, now you have. In fact, Sports Illustrated practically insists that you shot RAW+Jpeg. (Here's the link to their instructions to their photographers: http://www.siphoto.com/?nikonD2X.inc)

 

To those who insist that their skill level is so advanced that their photos never require post processing, I find this curious. There are lighting conditions where the dynamic range is simply beyond the abilty of the sensor and camera processing system to capture adequately in one exposure. In these circumstances, there is no "correct exposure." With RAW, one can convert the file twice at different "exposures" and blend the two conversions into one image that has detail and life in both the darkest shadows and brightest highlights. And there are so many situations where mixed lighting makes correctly setting white balance in the field almost impossible. There are a lot of adjustments on the camera that can achieve some RAW-like results in Jpeg, but I don't know any photographers who tweak contrast, sharpening, saturation, hue, tonal curve, etc. on every shot before they take it. I suspect your image quality standards or needs are not as high as mine, and that's OK.

 

Most of my exposures don't REQUIRE post processing. But many can be made better and more salable with it. It takes a lot of field experience to know what could and should be done in post processing, and a lot of Photoshop experience to know how to do it. But, the results that an experienced person can achieve with Photoshop in a few minutes is sometimes simply magic.

 

And finally, when you are selling to clients or art directors RAW gives you more flexibility to meet their particular images tastes even when you think the image is already perfect.

 

Jpeg vs. RAW is a very personal decision.

 

.

Robert,

 

With all due respect, do you really expect people who don't even know you to be able to gauge the sentimental value of these items--to you? Only you know that your late father gave you the Nikon F, or that this F saved you life in Viet Nam, or that the F4 took your first published pictures.

 

Without some connection to people we value, cameras and lenses are just tools made of glass, metal and plastic that should have no sentimental value at all.

There is quite a lot of sample-to-sample variation in this lens. My first one was just fair. I exchanged it for another one that is really sharp corner to corner. Yes, it's a little sharper at medium distances, but, it's still very sharp at infinity. It's also best about f4.5 and doesn't improve much stopping down more. It's obviously optimized for wide-open or near wide-open shooting at 8-20 foot distances. But, that shouldn't lead you to believe that it's not darn good in other situations.

I see this a little differently.

 

My personal experience with my two samples of these lenses was that the 17-55 was superior at f2.8-5.6, they were essentially equal at f8 and that the 17-35 was slightly better at f11 and f16.

 

Nikon has not abandoned the DX format for pro bodies and probably won't for a long time. Many pros, including me, shoot wildlife and outdoor sports and we need the crop factor, pixel density and "extra reach" of the DX format. Canon has had both full-frame and cropped pro cameras co-existing in their line for years. Why couldn't Nikon do the same?

 

But even if they did abandon cropped sensor in their pro bodies there would still be millions of pro bodies and millions more consumer bodies out there and lots of continuing need for DX lenses. I think the resale of the 17-55 will hold up better than the 17-35 because the 17-35 has already been supplanted by better and newer lenses covering these focal lengths.

I've had NX for a while and just upgraded to the latest version.

 

Now, when I open multiple images it tends to lock up after about 10 minutes. It

never locks up at the moment when I open the second image. When it locks, Task

Manager still works. It reports CPU usage from 50 to 100% even when I'm just

sitting there. The process that's using the CPU time is explorer.exe (which I

don't have open.) I must reboot to use any other program.

 

My computer is a HP4000 with dual Xeon processors and 3.5gigs of memory.

 

Any thoughts?

Narayan,

 

Although the 180mm will work with the 1.4x and 2x teleconverters, IMO it will not provide professional levels of sharpness or contrast at any f stop practical for wildlife shooting.

 

My comment about animals not standing still wasn't very clear. I meant that animals often move towards or away from the camera so zoom functionality is useful. I also find VR useful in the many situations where a tripod is impractical or impossible to use like inside a car or safari vehicle or at sporting events. VR works great with a monopod.

 

Regarding sharpness, my 70-200mmm equaled my 180mm at 5.6 and smaller. Neither was great wide open.

In its day (about 10-15 years ago) the 180mm f2.8 was considered a stellar lens because it was sharper than most older comparable lenses, especially the 200mm f4.

 

But by today's standards it's just not as outstanding. I had one that I liked when I used it with film and used it mainly for outdoor fashion shots with nice shallow depth of field. But with digital, it wasn't any sharper than my 70-200 f2.8 zoom I got later, and it didn't have the versatility of a zoom, VR, or a tripod foot. So I sold it. (It is smaller and lighter with a nice, compact built in hood, though.)It didn't do particularly well with the TC14b that I had then, but the 70-200 doesn't do particularly well with teleconverters either.

 

But more important, I wonder what type of wildlife you'll be able to capture with a 180mm lens. Even on digital, a 270mm (35mm equivalent) isn't usually enough lens unless you're shooting in a zoo and an animal park. I've found that 300mm (450mm equivalent) is a bare minimum for animals in the wild, 400mm is better, and 500mm is the minimum for birds. Zooms, autofocus and VR are all really great for wildlife because usually they don't hold still at the perfect distance from the camera.

John,

 

You don't say much about image quality. For most people, the 70-200 with a 2x extender doesn't meet their image quality standards. The biggest differences between what you're using now and either a 400 f2.8 or the 200-400 f4 zoom are image quality (much better) and size and weight (much larger and heavier.) and of course 1 or 2 stops more light.

 

Without a tripod or a monopod you won't see as much of that improved image quality. And maybe that isn't important to you.

 

VR isn't essential for sports, but, I have found it useful when panning at a slow shutter speed or when you want the fast moving parts of the scene to be blurred but the static parts to be sharp.

>You cant use it for magazine work? Says who?

 

In my experience, it depends on the publication, the quality of the image, and how badly they need it as to what they'll accept. I just had an image published in National Geographic Adventure magazine that I shot three years ago with a Fuji S2. It looked pretty darn good, too, if I do say so myself, but it wasn't too large,

The one you like better is warmer and more saturated. It's easy to set up the D2x to give you those colors. As has already been said, the D2x (and most pro-oriented cameras) give more natural neutral colors with normal saturation as their default, on the assumption that the images can, and most likely will, be further processed with Photoshop. This keeps any of the color channels from being over exposed and does make post processing easier, at least for me.

 

If you shot JPEGs and don't want to post process, the camera can be set to imitate almost any look. Try color mode III with saturation set to enhanced as a starter.

I just spent quite a bit of time in China with this lens and a D80, and, overall I liked it quite a bit more than the 18-70 that I also have. My copy is very sharp over the entire frame even at f2.8, and with the hood attached, flare has not been a problem. I didn't miss the 55-70 range, but I did sometimes wish it had gone wider. The focus is fast, and the construction is robust. I know because I dropped the camera right on the lens at the Great Wall and no damage was evident--sharpness is still great.

 

My key tip would be to never let the camera and lens combo rest on your neck. I use a neck strap for safety, but I always carry the camera with my left hand or, even better, under my left arm, (between my arm and body) lens facing backwards. It's very comfortable and protects the lens.

NX needs a lot of memory and processor speed. NX runs great on my old HP X4000 workstation (three years old) but it has dual Xeon 2.8ghz processors and 2.25 gigs of rambus ram. (This was one of the machines used to do the animation for the movie "Shrek.")

All of the recent Nikon battery chargers are also 125-250 volt usable in all countries.

It must be a thankless job being a camera design engineer. I used to get irritated because my Nikon 8008 would keep its exposure compensation even after you've changed rolls, maybe even to a different film. I guess you can't please everyone.

 

It seems to me that if you need compensation for a whole roll, changing the ISO makes the most sense. But, less than a roll, that's a close call. Either way they program it, they will irritate someone because they didn't notice compensation was still on or forgot to put it back on. (It doesn't save the camera company any money either way. It's just a decision on how to program a chip.)

I use the 400mm; it's a very, very sharp, contrasty lens. You would not be getting the best out of it, IMO, using a 1228 Gitzo. I use the heavier 1548 (with an Arca Swiss B1) and it's about right.

 

Contrary to the advice of some others, I don't use an electronic release for shooting with long lenses. I have found that applying pressure with my right (shooting) hand on the body and with my left hand on the lens helps make for sharper images, especially with moving subjects like wildlife.

I don't agree with the blanket condemnation of long telephotos with medium format.

 

I have had really good results with the Pentax A* 600mm f5.6 for the Pentax 645. It has ED glass and is quite sharp when used with a Gitzo 1548 carbon fibre tripod.

I, too, have used lithiums (Everready) with great success in two Pentax 645ns. I don't keep accurate track of how many rolls I've shot, but I'll bet each camera has shot over 50 on the original sets and they're still going strong. I have some autofocus and some manual focus lenses, so that probably helps somewhat.

 

I bought them at WalMart for $9.95 for four. I have read somewhere that HomeDepot has them for $9.50 for four. The price really isn't an issue for me because they're so good.