agitater

<p>"At least some of the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 lenses - the one I have and the new one - are "G" (no focus ring)"<br>

. . . no aperture ring, you mean?</p>

<p>I agree with Floyd . . . to a point. Photographing anything - people, grafitti, scrap, architecture, social points, political points, funny points, dramatic points and so on - that we happen to come across while exploring the streets of a city is all street photography.<br>

The 'problem' with Banksy's site is that it's not populated with photos of anything other than the street painting and street sculpture and street installations that he creates for himself (or that he organizes with the help of a team of acolytes, sycophants, helpers, etc.). Banksy is a business every bit as much as he is a person. The photos on his site are only of his own work. He documents his own work so that he can blog about it, generate invitations for the creation of new installations, and generally promote his own interests and fortunes. Good on 'ya, mate! Banksy doesn't photographically document anyone else's work (except to riff on it), and that makes him a street artist not a street photographer.<br>

IMO, none of the photos on the Banksy web site are particularly interesting, in and of themselves, because Banksy (or whomever is doing the photography for his site) is trying to feature his street art only. He's not trying to convince viewers that he is a photographer too.<br>

My favourite photo on the Banksy site is the one of the small collection of quick canvases he painted, signed and sold for $60 each in a pop-up kiosk in New York. In the middle of the display there was a separate sign which read "This Is Not a Photo Opportunity" and clearly indicates to me that for all his touted street cred and sarcastic criticism of others, Banksy has learned the value of copyright retention and the fact that his signature on small pieces of throwaway artwork (that he can now do in his sleep most likely) is actually worth $60 a pop (or more). There's so much wrong with Banksy now that wasn't wrong with him ten years ago.<br>

Anyway, he is not a street photographer.</p>

 

There's a full instruction sheet on the CC web site for each product including the Carry-Lite. What sort of other

instructions do you feel are needed?

If you buy something from a brick & mortar store, you have to spend time, burn fuel, put a bit of wear & tear on your car,

or spend the time and bus fare to return an item you don't like. So where does anyone come up with the idea that the

shipping cost should not be borne by the customer who is returning an online purchase? Consumers have always borne

that cost!

 

And what does a $10K order have to do with anything? How does anyone make a leap from "I just spent $10K" to "I

shouldn't have to pay the shipping cost of a return." It doesn't make sense. Some people want the best of all worlds -

superb online selection that no brick & mortar store can match, no responsibility for the cost of returns, no obvious

purchase shipping cost in the first place, etc., etc. They want a perfectly cost-free online shopping experience. It's

nonsense IMO - a pipe dream. Removing oneself from the advantages of brick & mortar store shopping is still a problem,

and complaining about having to pay a company to ship a return after an online purchase isn't going to alter the fact that

shipping companies work for money.

 

Online retailers have absolutely no responsibility to shoulder the cost of consumer indecision or changes of heart.

There are a ton of instructional videos for the various Cotton Carrier systems. Start here:

 

http://www.cottoncarrier.com/video2/?cat=3

 

. . . then do a search on YouTube.

No. Not street photography. It's just copyright protection for street artists and grafitti vandals. Banksy is a business now.

<p><em>"And which cards do you use for the backup slot?"</em><br>

<em> </em><br>

I use SanDisk Extreme Pro cards in both slots. My D800 is set up to write a NEF/Lossless Compressed + JPG High/Large to slot 1 (SD card) and a backup to slot 2 (CF card). FWIW, I don't shoot using Cl or Ch - rahter, single shot only. I use 16GB SD cards and 64GB CF cards in the D800. </p>

<p>During trips, when the CF card gets loaded up in its backup role, I swap it out for the next 32GB card in my bag and keep the full one as a backup (I also backup the day's shooting to my Macbook Air each night, and I don't re-use any SD cards during a trip which gives me another backup set which I store separately from the CF cards). You can't have too many backups. On a 2-3 week trip I go through anywhere from 6-12 SD cards and 1-4 CF cards. I've been using at least half my current crop of SD cards for several years - or anyway since the SanDisk Extreme Pro 95 MB/s cards first came out. I only picked up the 64GB CF cards when I picked up my D800 in May 2012. I organize my SD and CF cards in a Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket card wallet - very handy, and I've got a couple of them. </p>

<p>I know some photographers who install really large SD and CF cards in the slots and then never swap them out, preferring instead to hook the camera up to a laptop or desktop comptuer using the USB cable to transfer files directly from the camera. That's the slow way to do things. The fast way is to use an external card reader, i.e., a SanDisk USB 3 model (which is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed ports too). It's the fastest file transfer method whether you're using Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder to copy the files to a hard drive folder, or using your photo editing software to directly import the files. </p>

<p>I realize it's a higher up-front expenditure, but I never leave home without several SD and CF cards in my card wallet. Installing a pair of cards and never swapping them out increases the likelihood that a card failure will occur. The reason is simply that even the best quality cards have a finite cell life. That cell life is now measure in years and years of regular use, but I personally prefer to lower the chances of failure by maintaining a set of cards instead. The number of SD and CF cards I'd recommend for anyone is obviously highly dependent on the amount and frequency of shooting he does.</p>

 

<p><em>"After those, there are a few more good brands such as Kingston, etc."</em></p>

<p>I don't think that Kingston has been a good recommendation for a long time. Kingston used to make good cards; not any more. The cards also rate consistently near the very bottom in Rob Galbraith's testing.</p>

 

<p>I think that without ranging information or sufficient foreground detail with which to estimate distance, a camera's AF system can't estimate focus and set the lens. Nikon and Canon take different approaches to low light AF.</p>

<p>A Canon DSLR body with a Canon lens will often default to infinity when no other usable detail is present in the AF point and when the available light is lower than the AF sensitivity threshold. By comparison, a Nikon body is more likely to set a Nikon lens, in the same situation side by side with the Canon body & lens, to a mid-point. Nikon's approach seems to be to set a mid-point and then let the photographer grab the focus ring and tweak it.</p>

<p>Both makers' AF system are really good, but I think expecting them to work so far below their AF sensitivity thresholds might be impractical. Your recollection of the what the Canon was able to focus on and what the Nikon was able to focus on, without having the two cameras side by side in the exact same conditions might not represent a fair comparison. The Canon might do better - that's certainly possible - in a side by side test, in some situations. But in such low light, AF is a crapshoot with any camera. You seem to have described nighttime circumstances around -6 eV or darker which works out to 8 minutes or more to get a usable exposure at base ISO and an f/2.8 or larger aperture. An autofocus system from Nikon or Canon just can't work reliably in such conditions. The situation falls outside the capabilites of the AF systems design.</p>

<p>Live View, with a focus hood, is the way to go for extended night shooting. You can see what's going on, you can nail focus almost every time, and you have much more visible control over composition and exposure. Viewfinder + AF + very low light/nighttime shooting = frustration & dissatisfaction IMO. Live View + focus hood (e.g., a Cinevate Cyclops) + manual focus + very low light/nighttime shooting = creative control & success IMO. </p>

<p>It seems to me that most photographers who are doing star photography or astrography of any kind are never looking through a viewfinder unless they've got a camera mounted on a telescope. They're also not relying in any way on AF - too many problems. </p>

 

<p>I think that a fair-skinned subject with pale eyes and light blonde hair against a washed out sky with pale background details equals a really, really, really difficult target for the AF system to lock on. I'd say don't start messing with AF Fine Tune and focus target testing or anything of the kind. The camera's AF system is near flawless, but it looks like a combination of difficulties combined to fool the AF system just a bit. Still, as three other posters have shown, there's plenty of detail to sharpen things up reasonably well in pp.</p>

<p>Seems like an ideal shooting situation in which to check focus every few shots and then, if you're set up on a tripod, manually tweak focus just before taking the shot. That's another reason that the 24-70 AF-S lens is so great because you don't have to switch to MF - just grab the focus ring and touch things up.</p>

 

<p>"but personally, my priority for upgrade would be photo classes/seminars (to upgrade the photographer, so to speak) ahead of lenses, and lenses ahead of camera bodies."</p>

<p>Good advice always too. </p>

 

<p>I think the logical step up for you is the D7000 or the D7100. Frankly, and by comparsion, the technical image quality you can get out of your D5000 is better than the technical image quality you'd get out of a D300s.<br>

<br /> The only reservation I have about the D7000 is that some photographers have noted that the autofocus system is very finicky - that it requires more care and attention to the selection of appropriate focus targets than other Nikon digital SLR camera bodies. I'm not completely sure that I agree, and I certainly got a lot of productive use out of my own D7000 <a href="/photo/16997112">here</a>, <a href="/photo/17000492">here</a> and <a href="/photo/14054472">here</a> for example.<br>

<br /> The thing is though, I'm really much happier with my D7100. The autofocus system seems flawless, technical image quality is stellar, and the camera just works so reliably and smoothly that it feels like like the most natural thing in the world. It's the most expensive of the three cameras you're considering, but IMO it's clearly the best of the bunch and is also IMO the very best APS-C sensor camera on the market today. By far well worth the money.</p>

<p>Calumet's ProSpec cards have gone through a lot of ups & downs. They're slower in use than the specifications would have you believe. Calumet doesn't seem to have much control over manufacturing quality because the chip controllers are frequently flaky (that's the problem you're experiencing - although I've seen a few ProSpec cards that were working quite well - something which illustrates that quality control is all over the map).<br>

Calumet provides a warranty for the ProSpec cards that is at least partly also covered by Calumet's customer satisfaction policy. So I suggest that you go back to Calumet to exchange the ProSpec junk for SanDisk Extreme Pro (95MB/s) or Lexar Professional (600x & 1000x) cards instead. You'll have to pay the difference in price. You'll be much happier and your D800 will rarely again keep you waiting while a shot is being written to either card.<br>

SanDisk, Lexar and Integral offer the fastest tested SD and CF card write speeds and read speeds in the camera. If you haven't seen it yet, go to Rob Galbraith's site and have a look at the <a href="http://www.robgalbraith.com/camera_wb_multi_page9ec1.html?cid=6007-12451">D800 cards tests</a> of various brands (although I don't think Galbraith has tested the newer Integral brand of cards). It's a real eye opener that will help protect you from any more aggravation.<br>

In case you were wondering too, a poor quality chip controller in an SD or CF card can give fits to any card reader, laptop or PC - Mac, Windows, it doesn't matter, because the readers and the card slots in a laptop or desktop computer are just dumb devices. If a flaky controller in an SD or CF card is sending junk to the interface, the computer will often just stall and throw up an error.</p>

Deleted - double post.

<p>Sounds as though the camera is set to only allow the shutter to release if focus is acquired. If the camera can't lock onto something in the scene, the shutter button won't work. Some scenes and subjects don't offer good targets for the autofocus system.<br>

The camera doesn't have to refocus if you're not changing position while shooting the same scene several times in a row. It might just onto the same the same target over and over again.</p>

<p>Reuben - Both photos are noisy. The noise in the solid red, solid brown and solid green areas suggests that a high ISO setting was used to get the shots. Noise almost always softens images. You don't mention your shutter speed (or maybe I missed it somewhere in the thread?), so unless your shutter speed was fast enough to overcome mirror slap, the shutter press (if you did not use a remote trigger) and so on, softness can occur for that reason as well. Just as important, after getting a focus lock, did you manually touch up focus using the focus ring? If not, try it for the same shot. I agree with an early poster that those straight pool balls don't make the best AF target. I'd also suggest that if results from all your lenses seem soft that you may benefit from having another photographer watch what you're doing when shooting. Lower ISO, much faster shutter speeds, stable handheld and tripod technique - those are some of the most important keys to razor sharp shots with your very good collection of lenses mounted on the high resolution D7000.</p>

<p>If you're on a charter boat and whales are breaching between twenty and a hundred yards distant, the 70-300 should do well. Beyond that distance, you're going to be capturing more water than whale in your photos. Consider a longer, competitively priced tele-zoom such as the Sigma 150-500. In good light, it can be a very good lens for all sorts of wildlife photography including whale watching. The long end of the Sigma is very slow, but that's irrelevant in good light. Bring a circular polarizer.<br>

The Nikkor 16-85 is a very good choice. AF is quite fast, and the lens produces sharp, contrasty, color accurate results. Personally, I think it's the best general purpose/walkabout/street shooter/travel shooter that Nikon makes for DX bodies.<br>

I was hoping that Nikon's first lens announcement of 2013 would be something like an update of the 80-400 VR or a completely new zoom such as a 16-85 f/4 VR, but instead Nikon announced a rehash of the aging 18-35 FX wide-angle zoom.<br>

The newer Nikkor 18-300 is also worth considering, but so far I'm not overly impressed with my copy. It's not a disappointment, but IMO it's also not quite as good as the 18-200 VRII. The auto distortion control update in the latest version of the D7000 firmware includes the 18-300, but the complex edge distortion produced by the lens isn't quite perfectly sorted out by even the current firmware version.<br>

I've got the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 and the Sigma version as well. I like the Sigma better because I think it's a touch sharper than the Tamron and is slightly better in the corners and better wide open. However, the Nikkor 16-85 is just as sharp as either of these lenses, and sharper at some focal lengths too. The Nikkor build quality is slightly better than the Tamron or the Sigma, but both the third-party lenses are quite well built too. No complaints. The Nikkor is slightly more compact than either the Tamron or the Sigma if that's important to you.<br>

The Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX prime is amazing IMO, and can be used to produce wonderful images. It's yet another superb f/1.8 prime that Nikon seems to be able to design and produce at will and at vanishingly low retail prices.</p>

 

<p>It only takes about 15 seconds to set a custom white balance when you encounter lighting conditions (particularly indoors) which are challenging the auto WB setting or any of the WB presets. My/your/our/most people's impression from Nikon/Canon/Sony/Olympus/etc., etc., marketing is that preset WB and auto WB is godlike in its perfection. It is not - never has been - but it does nail things quite well most of the time. From your test shots, it may be difficult to tell exactly what objects or surfaces in the scenes were triggering differences in how each camera was reacting. From the shots though, what I see mostly are just exposure differences which can change from moment to moment in sequential shots even with the exact same camera and settings. I've found that using matrix metering often provides better overal auto WB and preset WB results from my D7000, D700 and D800. But any time I'm in a situation in which I suspect that WB might be challenging, I do a quick custom WB and eliminate any potential issue, again especially indoors. I'm getting the impressing from the landscape test shots that your Picture Control settings are not the same in each camera.<br>

<br />With a D300s, several years ago, I kept getting terrible auto WB results and selecting preset WB settings made things even worse. I couldn't figure out what was going on until I dug into the cutomization settings and found that I'd left them in tweaked positions from a previous shoot. Reset to defaults solved everything. <br>

<br />Your test shots under incandescent show slight tonal differences but the D40 shot also seems much more saturated. It almost looks as though the D40 Picture Control is set to Vivid and the D7000 Picture Control is set to Standard. </p>

 

<p>According to Gartner as of August 2011, Apple has about 10.7% of the PC market in the U.S. - less in most other countries. Developing for any operating system is difficult - expensive and time consuming, Apple/Mac OS X included. Any company that is developing primarily for Windows and secondarily for Mac OS X - especially a company producing niche software like Capture NX2 - has to be expecting to make sales to only a relatively small percentage of Apple's 10.7% market share. That small percentage has to be localized in a dozen or more languages as well. Expensive, expensive, expensive, with very little chance of profit from OS X sales.<br>

If you're solely an OS X developer, no worries. But if your software development structure is built primarily around Windows, porting/coding/developing for OS X at the same time is a massive loser.</p>

 

<p>There are third party batteries which work, and third party batteries which sort of work. All lithium-ion batteries used in digital cameras are chipped in order to work with the cameras' electronics to control current, estimate charge level, estimate remaining charge in any given duty cycle, communicate with a charger to accurately read voltage, etc., etc., etc.<br>

Although individual camera electronics are proprietary in nature, voltage is voltage and current is current. As long as the battery chip presents information in conventional ways so that the camera can read it usefully, and as long as the battery's rating is truthfully stated, and as long as the individual components of the battery are effectively insulated, and as long as the shell, doping and vibration/impact protection and quality of the terminal contacts are up to snuff, a third party battery will work just fine. The problem is, most of them are cheaply made and use terribly useless chips, some of them leak, few of them are properly sealed, stated ratings are an outright lie, and at $30 are actually stupidly overpriced for what you're getting. Nothing like a third-party, $20-$30 DSLR battery which dies with 50% of the charge left according to the camera indicator.<br>

Hahnel, for the most part, pays very careful attention to DSLR power specs and produces third-party batteries that are reliable, offer long duty cycles and excellent recharge characteristics. Hahnel is one of the few right now, but other battery makers (including Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Mallory, Panasonic, Energizer and Varta) are getting into the third-party DSLR battery business - and not just as, for example, a contractor for Nikon or Olympus - but as a competitive, branded maker of batteries which will compete with OEM models. The reason they're getting into it at this point in time has mainly to do with DSLR market penetration. It has become possible to make good money supplying third-party batteries for the most popular DSLR models. There are now mold makers in Korea and China that can produce battery shells and terminal busses for a fraction of the price they could just a few years ago (and they could already produce them quitely cheaply then - but the cost has to be apparently absurdly low for it to be truly worthwhile). Once the major battery makers get into it, you'll be able to much more easily buy a less expensive DLSR battery (even better than the already good ones being produced by Hahnel) than the ones supplied by the name brand camera makers for their own DSLR bodies. By this time next year, we'll be discussing the merits of the Mallory vs. OEM, Varta vs. OEM, etc., etc.</p>

 

<p>The Kata 3N1-33 fits your bill exactly. Backpack or sling carry, side access (so you don't have to fully dismount the thing, capacity for the gear on your list along with your laptop, and a relatively trim profile. It happens to be a decent carry too - comfort on long walkabouts aren't a problem.<br>

Howard Carson<br />Managing Editor, <a href="http://www.kickstartnews.com">Kickstartnews</a></p>