peter_nelson1

<i>It's not a moderators job to figure out how to get in touch with you if your photo.net registered email address is incorrect or you don't read it or everything sent to it gets spam filtered out.</i>

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Fine. But how do I keep from getting email from the riff-raff? Other web forums give people the options of ONLY getting email from moderators.<br><br>

<i>Most e-mail accounts offer filters to enable specific persons, such as site administrators, to maintain contact while filtering out the riff-raff.</i>

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So does mine, but I would need to know the moderators' email addresses to make a "white list" of them.

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Look, the bottom line is that Photo.Net's basic software infrastructure is old, weird and primitive. It doesn't have any of the capabilities of other modern web-forums.

<i>I've received admin mail from two people (for good reasons), and perhaps four messages from other users.</i>

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I'm a very active poster and before I instituted this policy I used to get all kinds of comments, advice, attempts to continue the discussion, suggestions, links and whatnot on every forum I joined. The peace and quiet I've enjoyed since adopting this policy is wonderful. I prefer to only get email from people I know and not from random stangers on the web, however well-meaning.

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I mean, if you just need something that doesn't bounce I could put a proper email address in my profile and automatically route all traffic from the photo.net domain to the bit bucket. Would that be better? The advantage of the current setup is that at least people KNOW I'm not getting their email because it bounces.

<i>Check your email field, and make sure the value plugged in there is correct and up to date.</i>

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No, you don't understand. I KNOW it's not up to date. I'm perfectly happy to correct that if I can be sure I will only receive email from the moderators/staff of photo.net with official business. I am NOT interested in getting email from the general membership on photo.net. Practically every other discussion forum on earth can do this, so I assume it's not hard.<br><br>

I've had a Photo.net account for years and that email address has been obsolte for a long time and no one ever complained before.

It's not a question of seeing my email address - I don't want to GET email from them. I have very effective spam filtering so I seldom get spam, which means I can usually avoid the little ritual many others are stuck with of having to decide which email to open and which email to ignore/delete.

Right now I'm blissfully untroubled by unwanted email from people on photo.net because I have an obsolete email address for photo.net. Apparently this disturbs Shun Cheung (he didn't say why) so I was trying to accomodate him, since he's a moderator, and I assumed he had some official photo.net business to comunicate about.

So I created a temporary email alias just for him, but because of the server problems mentioned above I had no way to give it to him.

What is the right forum to discuss <b>Photo.Net</b> issues?

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On one of the forums, one of the moderators, Shun Cheung, said . . .

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"<i>To Peter Nelson: your registered e-mail address in photo.net seems to be out of

date. Could you provide us a working e-mail address? </i>"

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I tried to respond via the "Email Shun Cheung" link (http://www.photo.net/shared/comm-to-

member?user_id=24372) but I just got an error from some server . . .

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<b>Server Error

The requested URL cannot be accessed due to a system error on this server.

AOLserver/4.5.0 on http://www.photo.net:8001</b>

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So then I tried to send a message via <b>"Contacting photo.net"</b>

(http://www.photo.net/info/contact-us-2?category=ACCOUNT)

and I got an error message that said,<br>

<b>Expected a 250 status line; got: 451 Temporary local problem - please try

later</b> <br><br>

Basically, most websites have a way to set an email address for the administrators to

use and a different one (or none) for the general public to see. I don't want to get email

from other photo.net visitors here; but I'm willing to accept email from the

administrators if it's necessary. How do I do that?

<i>I currently own four 28mm Nikkor Primes.</i><br><br>

I know this is OT, but do you mind if I ask WHY you have 4 28mm primes?

<i>Gee. I was hoping that when I put my 500mm lens on a digital camera it would grow into a 750mm lens. I waited and waited but it refused to do anything. Should I just keep waiting?</i>

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There's stuff you can buy that will help there. But if it stays at 75mm for more than 4 hours send it back to Nikon.

<i>I have survived 4 years with my D70 with only a Konika blower brush - the brush is removable and it can be used as the typical "rocket" blower. Never touched the sensor. I have changed lenses in the middle of shooting desert rallies. Dust comes, and gets blown off, I have done it even mid shoot, in the car, much to my friends' horror. </i>

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Excellent information! (Nice photos, too!)<br><br>

What I like so much about Hashim's comments is that they address two issues that I'm always raising in sensor cleaning discussions here and on other forums, and that people often ignore:

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1. In the REAL world we mostly don't get dust in our cameras just sitting around at home or leaving them in their camera case. We get dust changing lenses out in the field during active shooting situations. Usually during mid shoot where the client is expecting professional results. If I'm doing a five-hour model shoot I don't want her to ask what that blotch is on her face from the last 4 hours of the shoot! PS'ing a blotch out of a clear blue sky is one thing; taking it off of skin or hair detail is quite another. Making a sample dust image to automate it in PS isn't really practical unless you make one for each f-stop of each lens you're using, and keep updating the samples during the shoot as the dust changes. So any sensor-dirt solution must address real-world, out-in-the-(dirty, dusty)-field rapid-lens-changing shooting situations.

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2. You can't assume you will always have a stable, clean, well-lit place do do your sensor cleaning. You need a method that works for you in your car, tent, airplane, or cheap hotel room.

Just to confuse things even further (I play such a productive role in these discussions 8-) ) . . .

Some manufacturers, e.g., Tamron, have produced lenses that they claim are "digital" lenses in a different sense. Due to the 3D surface geometry of sensors there has been some concern that light hitting the sensor obliquely might not illuminate the entire sensor element surface so some makers have claimed that their optical designs result in the light hitting near the edges of the sensor to be more at right angles to the sensor surface than competing brands. I've never seen these claims tested or verified.

First: keep in mind that Nikon says to not touch ANYTHING to the low-pass filter. (pg 375 of my D300 manual) All of us who clean our own sensors (and that includes me) are knowingly, deliberately violating the instructions from Nikon - the company that designed and manufactured this device, and who presumably knows more than anyone else about it. We rationalize this by telling each other that they "have" to say this to protect themselves from some vague legal or marketing risk but none of us can prove this.

This goes beyond Nikon's motives - because they don't endorse any method, it results in a situation where everyone's on their own and no one has any idea what methods of caring for the AA filter are TRULY safe in the long run, and which methods works the best. As a result you will get an ENDLESS supply of advice and opinion about this and there is no objective way to sort it all out.

Good luck.

<i>Cool thing is that several of these lenses, the Tokina 11-16 and Nikkor and Tokina 12- 24 specifically, will <b>work</b> at the long end on full-frame!</i>

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If your definition of "work" is "doesn't vignette", then that's true. But keep in mind that you will be placing the outside envelope of these lenses' performance range much closer to the middle of the FX-frame. If you look at the corner and edge performance of those lenses in DX format, or the amount of CA they have at the edge and corner, that's what you'll now have much closer in. It might be worth it in a pinch or emergency, but not as a regular shooting lens.

<i>"(I) sometimes worry about build quality with the (T)amrons(.)" </i>

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I got lucky on my first try. I have a superb copy of the 28-75 that I use with my Canon 20D for studio work. It tested out better than Canon's 24-70 "L", and is lighter, to boot.<br><br>

BUT that lens has a huge amount of sample variation - I know one guy who returned his 3 times before he got a good one. When I was buying mine people on a couple of photography forums gave me a steady stream of horror stories of Tammie 28-75's with decentered elements, focussing problems, loose bits, etc.<br><br>

The reason why they sell so cheap is Tamron doesn't test them so they can pass the savings on to you! Factory testing is for those snobby, elitist Nikkor buyers who drink tea with their pinky finger sticking out. Real men drink beer and test their own d*** lenses!<br><br>

(but just to be on the safe side buy it somewhere where you can return it easily)

In that range the zooms outperform the primes due to some weird econo-optical alchemy that no one can explain.

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There are lots of lenses to choose from - The Nikkor 12-24 (DX), which I own, also the Tokina 12-24, Tokina 11-16, Sigma 10-20, and Nikkor 14-24 (an FX lens).<br><br>

Every one of them is a big basket of compromises and the game with D300 wide angles is to pick the compromises you can live most comfortably with. On the menu are edge and corner softness, optical distortion, flare and internal reflections, vignetting, and chromatic aberration. Not to mention problems with size or weight and problems using hoods and filters. <b>ALL</b> of the wide angles for the D300 feature 2 or more of these problems to some noticable degree.

<i>My point is, we need as much info as possible about what a person wants to do in order to give suggestions that will help.

</i>

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Agreed, but no one answered my earlier question about why this isn't <b>obvious</b> to people who post these questions.<br><br>

This happens SO OFTEN around here (and on other photo forums) - people ask what gear to get without saying what they want to do with it - that there must be some fundamental aspect of the psychology of these folks that I (or we) don't get. <br><br>

Is it the difference between serious photographers and casual snapshooters? I'm 55 and I took my first photo for pay (a publicity shot for a town politician) at 15 with a Zeiss Contaflex and I've never looked back. I'm only an amateur but a very serious one who does studio figure, fashion, dance, and still-life work and wildlife photography. I used to do PJ work years ago and I'm trying edge back into it - I've had some recent publication credits in local papers.<br><br>

But I don't usually do snapshots - it drives my wife nuts that I don't bring a camera to family or social gatherings, or even on vacations unless there's something on the vacation that's of special photographic interest to me, like a trip to the Everglades. So is that's what's going on here? I do photography in a very puposeful, deliberate way, so I can't imagine the idea of buying gear without some pupose in mind?

I know regular readers have heard this rant from me before . . .

but WHY do people post questions like this, asking what gear to buy, without offering a CLUE what kind of photography they like to do? Would you use the same gear to shoot nudes in the studio as you would to shoot birds in a meadow? Would you use the same lenses to shoot flowers and caterpillars as you would to shoot architectural interiors?

It's like posting a question to Motor Trend asking what sort of vehicle to buy without offering any clue about whether you wanted it to commute to work, drive your family to a ski resort, tow a boat, or race in solo events at your local SCCA meets. Or without offering any sign of priorities WRT fuel economy, reliability, budget, etc.

The thing that gets me is that none of this seems obvious to the OP's. We get questions framed this way over and over again. Why IS that?

When I buy a lens or other piece of gear I do so with a particular use in mind.

<i>Not trying to split hairs or get under your skin, but since you say that lens was defective, how would it have been a good test? A good test would have pitted a non- defective lens against something similar that was a known quantity.</i><br><br>

How else would you propose I discover it was defective except by doing those tests? It's not like there was a sticker on the box saying "defective lens" but I decided to pit it against a good lens just to spite it. I just ran my standard battery of tests on it and it came out so badly I had no choice but to conclude it was defective.

I have 3 DSLRs and a high-ish-end P&S, I've never seen it. I'm also a little skeptical about the responses others here have given that it's common or happens all the time, because these things are solid state devices, and, like the transistors and other components in computer memory and microprocessors, if component failures were that common we'd be junking our computers left and right. I'm an engineer with a good general science background so I'd be interested to hear anyone's explanation of what would cause such failures that frequently. (and even more so, why they would sometimes "heal" later, as one poster suggested)

I HAVE, however, noticed hot pixels during my incoming qual tests. As many people here know, I test the bejeezus out of camera gear I buy and return defective units immediately for refund or replacement. I always carefully test digital cameras for hot pixels, doing long-ish exposures at high ISO's and blowing them up to 400% on my PC to look carefully. I then repeat the test with a short exposure and defocussed white surface looking for dead pixels.

I've had to return two cameras within hours of purchase for hot pixels. But I've never had hot pixels "appear" later. Most people don't test as fanatically as I do, so MY theory is that people don't NOTICE them until later when they happen to do a shot (dark background, high ISO, or long exposure) that reveals it. (your EXIF data says this is ISO 3200, which is certainly asking for trouble).

BTW, I've saved all my original test images so I can compare them to images taken later to see if any pixels change.

<i>Im not concerned though as it's just a tad tighter than normal and this may play itself out over time.</i>br><br>

Yes, but if it does, which part is changing - the body or the lens? You sure don't want to loosen up the body! That's why I suggested loosening it on an old sacrificial film body.

<i>What I didn't see mentioned above is that lenses behave differently at different focusing distances. A lens that is great at 15 ft may be a disaster at infinity and vice versa.</i>

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But if you saw the images I linked-to - it wasn't just a little soft at 10 feet - it was pretty horrible. And it was also soft shooting my house from the end of my driveway in my CA tests. There's no way to get around the fact that the 11-16 I tested was just plain defective.<br><br>

The other thing is that bad performance at different distances is a defect just like bad performance at certain f-stops, or certain focal lengths. For a wide angle to deliver poor performance wide open or one stop below, at 10' means that you can't use it in many indoor situations where you might need a fast wide angle for a tight spot.<br><br>

I have to say in all my years of testing lenses I've encountered relatively few cases where there was a lot of distance sensitivity. I've had a couple of lenses that were soft near infinity (one was a 400mm Sigma that you would HOPE might be good near infinity) and I've run into several lenses with "macro" modes that got squirrely in macro. I firmly believe that if you like to shoot bugs and flowers and stuff like that you should either buy a lens that's designed for it like the Nikon 60mm f/2.8 micro, which is a great lens, or use extension tubes.

<i>I leave VR off by default on my 16-85mm and only turn it on when I need it. I figure there are parts inside that can wear if always used, and most of the time I'm shooting outdoors anyway.</i>

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This is a very good point. Also turning VR off probably saves battery.<br><br>

In my particular case I expect I'll mostly be using this lens for street and concert photography at night, so I'll probably need VR a lot.

I'm surprised I never noticed how much variation there is in lens mount tightness before, considering how long I've been shooting (decades and decades). I recently bought a 300 f/4 and it seemed to have a lot of rotational play (i.e., roll about the optical axis) in the mount on my D300. So I tried it on my D100, and both of my FM2N's, and my N80. Same thing.

So I then tried my new 70-200 VR and noticed that IT had the same degree of rotational play; I had just never noticed it. I repeated my experiment with my 24-70 f/2.8 and my old 180 f/2.8 with the SAME results on multiple bodies - I don't know why I never noticed this!

But then a few days ago I got a brand new Nikkor 12-24. And it took quite a bit of force (maybe like the 50 f/1.8 of the OP) to mount it and it has little or no play. I'm wondering if I should try loosening it up by repeatedly mounting it and unmounting it on one of my old expendable FM2N's so I don't "stretch" the mount on my D300 with it.

<i>I think we need to think harder about when to have VR on and off, as I've also learned on my 18-200</i> <br><br>

When I posted this on another forum someone pointed out that Nikon uses different algorithms and maybe even different VR designs for different VR lenses, so it's not clear how well my results transfer to other lenses. The 70-200 is my only VR lens so I can't compare it.

<i>Yes, test carefully, but test within the bounds of what the lens is designed for. </i>

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How was it not fair? Shouldn't the center be tack-sharp from 10 feet away? Someone complained that it was unfair that I compared it to a 24-70 from 15 feet away (at 24mm), but as you saw in my 12-24 test, the 12-24 BEAT the 24-70 under those same conditions. <br><br>

Anyway, my CA tests were performed outside under perfect cloudy-bright conditions and showed that the CA was asymmetrical so it couldn't be corrected in PP. (also those same tests showed that the roof tiles on my garage were also soft at f/4 and f/5.6.)<br><br>

The bottom line is that my copy of the 11-16 was defective. I don't know why Rene' thinks it's a big deal that his copy is good - that's the whole third-party lens experience in a nutshell - they are inconsistent so you have to do lots of incoming qual tests. I love my Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 (for my Canon) but I got very lucky with my Tammie just as Rene' did with his 11-16. - the web is filled with reports of people who had the same problems with their Tammie that I had with the 11-16. I know one person who returned the Tamron <b>three</b> times before he got a good one! Obviously he values his time less than I do.<br><br>

Nikkor is also capable of sample variation, of course, but in my 40 years of experience in photography they seem to be LESS inconsistent than the 3rd parties. I test both just as thoroughly, and as you saw in my Nikkor 12-24 review, I don't pull my punches with Nikkor either.<br><br>

Some people think the third parties are just as good as Canon and Nikon and you're just paying for the nameplate with the latter. But I go to lots of workshops and lots of places where I see pro's at work and <b>MOST</b> of the time they are shooting with Canon and Nikon glass,

<i>In our last exciting episode I wondered aloud whether Nikon's advice to turn VR off

on a tripod meant that I should also turn it off when using "tripods of opportunity" while

shooting street action at night, which was the whole raison d'être for my 70-200 VR

lens in the first place. I noted that my years of experience have taught me how to use

any convenient stable object - police barrier, fire hydrant, building corner, wrought iron

fence - to get a stable support in lieu of an actual tripod. Several people have

expressed skepticism that this was possible but I've got the publication credits that

say otherwise.</i>

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Anyway I used my standard indoor lens-test setup (a page of the Wall Street Journal

taped to my studio wall) and set up the camera 15 feet away. I used a

Bogen/Manfrotto 3058 for the tripod.<br><br>

At shutter speeds down to 1/8th of a second there was no discernible difference with

VR on or off. But at ﾽ second, the the VR shots were blurry - blurrier than the non-VR

shots and blurrier than the 1/8th of a second ones. There was no discernible

difference between the 1/8 and 1/2 second shots with VR off.<br><br>

But the real test is "hand held" with a "tripod of opportunity". So I tried two

different "tripods of opportunity" - bracing the camera with my hand against a table on

wheels (the kind that lock down when you apply weight to the table, so I had to keep

my hand pressed on the camera), and bracing the camera with my hand against a

seamless stand. For each one I took two shots and selected the best one (this is how

I shoot normally). The results were interesting - apparently VR treats a "tripod of

opportunity" just like a real tripod, as I feared. (and contrary to what some people

predicted on the basis that my hand would introduce enough motion to undermine

that).<br><br>

With 1/8 second exposures there was no difference. But at ﾽ second the best hand-

held/supported shots with VR off were sharper than the VR ones. So the bottom line

is that if you are going to shoot handheld, but braced against a solid object like a park

bench or overturned car, at longish exposures, turn VR OFF because it thinks it's a

tripod.<br><br>

It should be noted that 1/2 second is usually too long in practical terms to shoot street

action due to subject movement. At ISO 1600 with an f/2.8 lens, 1/8 or shorter is

usually enough to get good shots and my experiments suggest you can safely leave

VR on, at least with the 70-200.