dwight200

March 28, 2015

Have you considered using DSLR Dashboard? I recently got it and tried it out for some focus bracketing. I used it with my Android phone, but I believe the program is available for Windows also. Not sure about Mac. The download is free. The only thing I needed was a "On-The-Go" adapter for the USB cable. Radio Shack supposedly carries them but when I went to get one they were out. I ordered one online from Amazon but it took several weeks to actually get it. You might have better luck ordering online from Radio Shack. Not sure whether you need one of them when using a computer instead of an Android phone. The program will do Live View so you can display the image on the computer (and presumably through the projector). You can control all the stuff on the camera from the computer. http://dslrdashboard.info/

December 2, 2014

I've been using digital cameras since 1999. The first couple cameras I got the store extended warranty on. The first camera I had I used the warranty. The second camera is still working. The third, and later cameras were Nikon cameras and have had no problems. I did not get a store warranty on them The only Nikon item that I've sent back for repair was a remote release that quit.

My feeling about the store extended warranty is that if it costs more than 5% of the purchase price per year of warranty it's overpriced. True, I did use one, but that was in the early days of digital cameras and I figured the technology wasn't quite mature yet. In the last 10 years none of my cameras has had any problems (knock on wood).

November 13, 2014

One thing you see occasionally is people trying to use the Bulb setting to open the mirror and shutter.

This is definitely NOT a good idea. In addition to the danger of your finger slipping off the release button while something's in the way of the shutter, using Bulb implies that voltage is applied to the sensor, increasing the chance of attracting statically charged dust.

The Mirror-Up setting is there for a purpose. Use it.

I'm sure most people know this, but cleaning threads attract people who have never done it so it's good to be complete in the description of what to do and what to not do.

November 11, 2014

(1) Rocket blower. Blow out the mirror box and the camera end of the lens. Then mirror up and blow off the sensor. Lens back on and check for spots. I bring up a white page on my word processor and stick the lens right up against it at a small aperture. That way there's nothing imaged and I can do the whole job at my desk. If the first blow didn't work I try a second one. (2) If the blower doesn't work, I try the Arctic Butterfly. Same process. (3) If the butterfly isn't enough I use the swabs with eclipse. At this point the stuff is probably stuck on so it takes the liquid to make sure you get it off. I generally have to use two or three swabs. The swabs leave streaks of liquid on the sensor assembly that are visible, but they evaporate fairly quickly. Sometimes the first swab will leave some streaky residue. Usually the second one will remove that. Sometimes the second swab will leave some spots, but three have always left my sensor clean enough for me. I don't obsess over every last spot, just the large ones.

PS: I use the pre-moistened swabs. That way I don't have to guess how much liquid to use.

November 10, 2014

There are plenty of wide vistas in HI, but you don't really need an ultrawide. Stitching technology is so good these days you can do a lot with it, even handheld if you're careful.

If I were doing a wedding and vacation in HI, I'd take the 24-70 and the 70-200 and probably the 1.7 and/or 2.0 teleconverter.

For the wedding, you might consider renting some gear there. Then you don't have to carry backups.

June 19, 2014

I got the 28-300 several years ago and use it frequently. I'm not concerned with absolutely the finest sharpness all the time and the 28-300 is very convenient as a general purpose lens for my purposes (primarily photojournalism type stuff and documentation). I don't sell photos so they only have to please me. The 28-300 is not as sharp as the 24-70-200, but it's pretty close IMHO.

I kept my 24-70-200 and use them for indoor events where the f/2.8 is useful and I generally don't have to switch lenses a lot. But those are special events and for general use the 28-300 is probably on my camera 60-70% of the time.

April 17, 2014

I got a D800E about 6 months ago. It's not my primary camera, more of a special purpose body. I only use my best lenses on it, so I don't have a comparison to the lesser lenses.

I just wanted to comment on the file size. I have a computer that's about 10 years old now running Win7, with a 1TByte drive and about 3Gigs of RAM. I think the 3Gigs is my major limitation now. I have no problem using LR or PSCC on my files. However, if I try to use several files in PSCC simultaneously (for panoramas or focus stacking or HDR) I do have some issues with the computer. When I have those problems I switch to my laptop, which has 8Gig RAM. No issue then.

As far as storage is concerned, I only have a few thousand images at this point. My images are backed up on 3TByte external drives and my total collection is on the order of 1.2 TByte, so I really don't have a problem with storage.

Yet.

April 14, 2014

I had a D3. One day I discovered I didn't have a D3. It disappeared. Went through a bunch of stuff and my insurance covered it less depreciation and deductable.

Needed a replacement but it was a choice between a used D3S or a D4. I went with the D4.

I was a little hesitant since early reports were saying there's not much difference between the D3S and the D4 (other than the price). I had skipped the D3S figuring it was an incremental upgrade. But I got the D4 anyway (pre D4S).

As far as the image is concerned, I find the D4 pretty similar to the D3. 16 MPx instead of 12 MPx is not that large. The files are a bit larger but still manageable easily with my old computer. (Later I got a D800E and the files are really significantly larger. My old computer handles single files no problem, but if I combine a bunch of files [panoramas, focus stacking, etc] it bogs down).

As for the handling, it took a bit to get used to the new button positions, but not a big deal there. As far as low light performance is concerned, there's a significant difference from the D3 to the D4. Since I didn't have a D3S, I can't comment on low light performance comparison between D3S to D4. I have the impression that AF is a bit faster, but since there was a significant time gap of several months between the two my memory could possibly be faulty.

I do a lot of low light work so I do notice a difference between the D3 and the D4. I felt comfortable using the D3 up to 6400. It went up to HI2 (25K) and I tried it a couple times but it took a lot of post work to get something useful out of it. I use the D4 up to 12800 pretty often. It goes to HI4 (200K). I tried using ISO levels from 10K up and found that I could get reasonable results without excessive post work up to about 25K-50K. Above that I could only get reasonable results if I could have gotten usable images at 50K. 100K and 200K produce funky colors which are very difficult to process. I did not spend a lot of time playing with the stratospheric ISO levels but my impression is that they're there for emergency work only. It's possible someone can get better results from them than I did.

Overall, I'm happy with the D4. Once again, the D4S appears to me to be an incremental improvement over the D4, and I'm not really feeling like I need an upgrade. I'll wait a couple years for the D5 and see what comes about then.

March 24, 2014

The XQD card is a real problem, since it's only used in 2 cameras. It has advantages in speed over the CF cards, but until some other camera(s) start using the card it's going to be a low-volume production, which means you won't get low prices.

If you need the speed for your shooting, get the higher speed card. The expense is not that great compared to the camera body. Parts for your Ferrari are going to be more expensive than parts for your Yugo.

March 14, 2014

VR will not do any good if you're using flash. The flash is generally a millisecond in duration or less, corresponding to a fast shutter speed. VR operates by moving a lens element at a rate of about 2 milliseconds or 500 Hz. Using VR at high shutter speeds is not recommended, since it can actually degrade the image.

Check out http://www.bythom.com/nikon-vr.htm

March 10, 2014

"maybe it's because I'm used to big lenses and having an L-plate on the D800, but the D4s didn't seem ridiculously heavy to me."

I have an L-bracket on both the D4 and the D800, and I swap lenses between them. I do notice a weight difference between them. Being used to shooting with the D3, now the D4 (the D800E is a recent acquisition), the D800 does feel light. It just feels like a toy to me. However it takes great pictures. I do have to take a bit more care to get the most out of it, but I use it for shots I can set up. The D4 is used for events where I don't have the time or ability to set up a shot. I get the shot that's there at the moment.

I'm really hooked on the vertical grip, having used one for almost 10 years now. I don't have one for the D800E (yet). The D800E gets used with a tripod 90% of the time and the D4 is hand held 90% of the time. Having the built in flash to use as a commander makes it really useful. I missed that on my D3 and now my D4.

I've tried the D800E up to ISO 2500 and it does well, but I generally try to keep it down. I haven't had time to really do any extensive testing.

March 10, 2014

"Summary: ISO 25600, in image review, is pretty darned good. HI4 is more of a joke, though I imagine it might downsample to a low web resolution okay."

I got a D4 a while back and I use high ISO a lot. Naturally I had to try out HI4 almost as soon as I got it. It sucks.

In the 16 months since then (although not doing rigorous testing) my opinion is that I will use ISO up to 12800 on a regular basis. ISO 25K is pretty good and ISO 50K is usable with a lot of post work. ISO 100K and 200K are there for emergencies only. You can get some usable stuff out of them, but only if you could have gotten images from ISO 50K. Above that the color balance starts to get weird. Noise you can deal with by downsampling, but the colors will take most of your post work.

The D4S is supposed to be somewhat better, but I wouldn't expect it to be that much better. I'll stick with the D4 for now.

February 11, 2014

IrfanView will make contact sheets and label the images with file names.

I don't know whether you can automate date/time labels from EXIF data. You can automate the file date/time. IrfanView is Windows only.

February 7, 2014

200 photos per round, 5 rounds, about 1000 shots.

200 photos per round, 5 minutes per round, a bit more than 1 shot per second.

The camera has 66,000 shots and your friend put 1000 on it. I'd say you did most of the work on the shutter. Consumer cameras are rated at around 100,000 shots, but that's an average. Some will do more, some less.

20,000 shots/year is fairly heavy usage for a consumer camera.

February 6, 2014

I'd go for the f/2.8

That will help with weddings at poorly lit venues and will also give you shallow DOF. I use my 70-200 f/2.8 VR1 a lot and find that I use it wide open frequently.

For newspaper work I generally use the 28-300. It gives me lots of wiggle room on focal length and it's sharp enough for general purpose use. The newspaper resolution is so low that the lens resolution isn't important.

January 27, 2014

"...We all know you'll never see a Unicorn if you have a camera with you..."

Too bad. Since most everyone has a camera in their cell phones these days, I guess Unicorns are doomed.

January 26, 2014

Just a guess, but it may have been the aperture. The aperture in your eye is fairly small. I can't see what camera you used here, but many cameras have aperture dimensions significantly larger than the eye. That means the eye subtends a narrower range of angles from the subject. If the colors are due to refraction, they come at you at different angles. If the camera aperture captures a lot of different angles/colors, they all mix together to white.

January 23, 2014

+1 for Lightroom. I find it easy to use for RAW conversion and photo adjustments. And it has the advantage of the catalog to help you find things when your list of photos gets too large for your memory to handle.

If you go for Lightroom, try to learn as much as you can about it early in the game. The online tutorials can be a big help here. When I first started using it I just used it for the editor. Eventually I started putting keywords onto the images and that helped me to search for things. But it was several years before I started using the 1-5 star ratings and color labels to sort things out and eventually I had to go through 30,000 images to sort them.

I never developed the ability to delete the semi-useful and duplicate images (I do delete the downright junk stuff) so they cluttered up the catalog. Adding the ratings (1 star is fair, 5 stars is great, 0 stars is not really worth much) and/or color labels (green=great, red=rotten, yellow=Yeah!, blue=But I thought it would be useful......) makes it easier to figure out which of a given subject is the one you liked most.

January 12, 2014

FX or DX is irrelevant (assuming you're comparing the two lenses on the same body). It's a field of view comparison, not a sensor comparison.

December 22, 2013

The 17-55 fits the DX format well. If you go with the longer lens you will wish you had something wider. The only reason for getting the longer lens might be if you were planning to FF at sometime in the not too distant future.

My 17-55 was my primary lens for my DX camera. The 24-70 is my primary lens for my FF camera. When I want to go wider, I stitch.

November 23, 2013

So everyone has their favorites, for different reasons.

When I was just starting to shoot RAW I tried several different programs for conversion. Back then, they were all quite different, both in their interface and in capability. There were a couple of shots that needed several different adjustments and I could not find one program that did both adjustments well so I had to use two different programs.

Eventually I had more than 10K images to play with and since my memory isn't as good as it used to be I needed a way to find things. Lightroom was the solution I settled on.

There are still things that LR doesn't do, so I also use Photoshop occasionally, but after I get an image through PS it goes back into LR so it's in the catalog.

"Best" is subjective. There may be other converters that do some things better than others, but for my purposes, LR has enough features not found elsewhere that it's the best one for me.

November 12, 2013

Since someone mentioned really high ISO in the D4, I just thought I'd add a note on the D4's ISO 200K (H4.0) setting.

First of all, I have not done extensive testing. This is just at the level of "second impression". When I first got the D4 I naturally tried shooting it in the dark at ISO 200K. I got some images but they aren't anything I'd like to show anyone, so I pretty much dismissed it as marketing more than technology advance.

Later I was doing some indoor shots at a conference. They had the power point show on and the room was darkened, so I tried taking a few shots at ISO 25K, 50K, 100K, and 200K. I was able to get usable images at 200K, but only if there was enough light to get good images at 50K. The 200K images had really wild colors and it took a lot of postprocessing to get something useful out of them. When there wasn't enough light to get a good image at 50K (not doing handheld time exposures), the 200K images were pretty poor. Yes, you can get something out of them, but the utility of the images depends on how desperate you are to get something.

Again, I did not do extensive testing, and this was a one-time observation, but I probably won't use anything about ISO 50K for anything important. I can get images at 12800 that will clean up pretty well, but from there to 50K you're talking about extensive noise processing and possibly even downsampling.

I still think the D4 is a great camera, and there may be a way to use H4.0 that I haven't tried yet. H2.0 is still pretty impressive in my book, and I use 10K a lot now that I can do it.

November 9, 2013

I took my camera, set the shutter to 1/1000 second, and took several shots of a fluorescent bulb in an orientation such that the shutter was travelling along the length of the tube. That meant the shutter was taking small samples of the tube at different times. I stacked several of them into an image which you can see below. You can see the color shifts of the lamp with time. The shutter is travelling vertically in the image.

November 3, 2013

I have a Nikon SB800 and a Nissin Di866. The Nissin was about half the price of the Nikon flash when I bought it. It does a good job and is mostly compatible with the Nikon cameras.

There are a couple of things that the SB800 does that the Nissin flash doesn't, but for most uses the Nissin flash works well. Unless you try to do fancy things with your flash, the Nissin will do the job.

October 22, 2013

I copied a number of old slides with my camera using a slide copying adapter. I had tried copying some with my scanner, with poor results. The camera did better, but it's not simply a matter of loading a slide and pressing the shutter.

First, using a 50mm lens on the adapter, the slide image is smaller than the sensor frame. This means you have to crop the image. Also, the slide is sometimes at a slight angle, so it has to be straightened in post.

Second, I first tried just taking a light bulb and shining it on a white wall, then using that as a light source to illuminate the slide. I couldn't find the time to do all the slides at once, so each time I set it up the exposure was different. I finally added a bracket with a halogen lamp to keep the illumination uniform.

Third, the white balance was frequently off in the resulting photo.

All that meant that postprocessing was necessary for all the copies.

Details are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/photofarmer/sets/72157603904635429/

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Posts posted by dwight200