juhaniv

<p>This is my first posting on Wednesday pic, but I have been following the thread for a long time. These pictures are always very nice and interesting.<br>

My pic is taken in La Jolla last week, when I was on a business trip in San Diego. D90, 24mm, F/13.</p><div></div>

<p>When shooting wide open with f/1.8 lens it is very important to get the focus exactly where you want it. If you want the eye to be in focus, you must focus to eye, not the shoulder. You did not mention which focus mode did you use. I think with that lens, you need to use single focus point to get it right.<br /> These samples are a bit small to judge the focus accurately, but it seems to me that in all of them the focus is in front of the subject. First one in the elbow, second in the shoulder and third maybe in the hand holding the microphone.<br /> What comes to noise, these are one of the cleanest D70 low light pictures I have seen, so I would not be worried about that at all.<br /> You could also check in controlled environment if your lens/camera combo focuses accurately. I had some problems with my D90/50mm f/14 combo. However, I would not suggest that as primary suspect in this case.</p>

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<p>I would recommend you give also Nikon Capture NX2 a try. They have a one month full working trial version available. Workflow is very different from Adobe tools, so it takes some time to get used to it. With RAW files is is very good tool to have.<br>

I use the Windows version for 95% of my photo editing needs. For the rest I use Photoshop Elements.</p>

<p>It depends on what kind of effect you are looking for. If the filter is only for the purpose of protecting the lens, you should definitely use something else than circ polarizer. I use Hoya HMC Super UV[0]. It does not change the picture in any way - just protects the lens.</p>

<p>It is very difficult to say without seeing a sample picture. Could you post one?<br /> Some cameras that I have owned have had problems with very bright lights, which have caused lines, or rather bands, going across the image.</p>

<p>I believe Macs have the native display gamma set to 1.8 and sRGB gamma is 2.2. This would mean that if you use non-color managed browser on Mac, even sRGB tagged images would not look right. The link Lars sent has also information on Mac specifics and it suggests that you should re-calibrate your monitor to gamma 2.2.<br>

I would suggest that do not try to compensate the difference by oversaturating the images you upload. Try instead make your system fully color managed. I'm using color managed Firefox 3.0.12 on my Vista PC, and colors are the same both in Photoshop and browser.</p>

<p>Did you have the exposure compensation set at +0.7 on purpose as it was in the sample image? That might contribute to the problem you are seeing.<br>

What Albert is saying above, is very true. When you have very high contrast between the subject and the backgound, camera cannot capture the whole scene accurately. Increasing the exposure to get the shadow areas more into the usable range (at the expense of blowing out hilights) helps, but best results will be achieved by getting the subject's lightning to match the background.</p>

<p>There is quite abit of overexposure in your sample pic. If you look at the histogram, it is clearly on the right side and blacks are completely missing.<br>

In the sample picture your subject is in the shade, but there is direct sunlight on the background. It is quite possible, that your camera's auto WB compensates for the direct sunlight and that is why the subject in the share is slightly on the blue side. That is very simple to fix in PhotoShop - or any other serious photo editing tool. You can also set that manually in your camera when you know that you have mixed lightning.<br>

I did just a simple curves adjustment and slight warming with Capture NX2. On my monitor this seems much better now.</p><div></div>

<p>To my understanding IE just ignores the color profile. Even photos that are in sRGB are not displayed correctly unless the monitor profile happens to be exactly the same as sRGB - which I assume is fairly unlikely.<br /> Firefox 3.0.x does handle color management correctly. You just have to turn on the color management on in the configuration. (about:config -> gfx.color_management.enabled; true) Firexox 3.5 changed the color management engine, and that broke the functionality at least with my monitor profile - maybe it works with some other setups.</p>

<p>If you have the raw files, you might be able to improve the pictures a bit. I opened the first sample in Capture NX2 and histogram is pretty severely on the left side. I could not get any detail out of the grooms suit.<br>

I adjusted the curves so that shadows got more light, applied some noice cancellation and applied 31%, 5 pixel radius unsharp mask with threshold of 9. Result is here:<br>

http://www.vanhalat.net/images/img5823h.jpg<br>

I don't know if that is much better than the original, but it is a bit lighter.</p>

 

<p>Are they darker only on photo.net, but not in other sites where you may have donloaded them? I doubt the site would do anything with them if the photos have color profile included.<br>

Which browser are you using? Do you know that it is color managed? As far as I know, IE is not and so far I have been able to get only 3.0.x version of FireFox do it correctly. FF 3.5 chaged the color management engine, and it did not work well in my PC.</p>

<p>I have had S2 Pro for some years - or still have it, but CCD broke several years ago and I did not have it fixed.<br>

I think it is a fine camera. Technology is from a few years back, which means that high ISO performance is not quite on the same level as in current cameras. I think colors in pictures were quite nice and body was very solid, much more than in the current entry level cameras. I had some banding issues in very high contrast images, but not to the extend that it would have been a big issue.<br>

I'm sure S2 would be good for learning SLR use. However, $400 sounds a bit expensive, as you could get some new entry level Nikon or Canon with almost the same price. My quess is that with the improved imaging algorithms and sensors in current cameras, image quality cannot not be any worse than in S2, but I have not really bee following up on the reviews of the recent entry level cameras.</p>

<p>I have been using the Capture NX2 in 64bit Vista for about six months now. It works well enough to be usable, but it does fail in file writing operations time to time and has a few other bugs. So far I have not lost any files because of those - just a restarting of the NX2 is needed time to time.</p>

<p>I wish Nikon would start supporting 64bit and fix the minor annoyances. Once you get used to NX2 RAW workflow, there is no going back to PS or any other SW.</p>

<p>Nice action shots. I'm not much of an expert in sports photography, but a couple of things cought my eye.<br>

The backgound in some of the images has some distracting elements that did not support the image. Like in the "spin" image - there is the light post sticking out from the persons knee. In the "Jump and sit" the building on the background is a bit too sharp imho. As you were already shooting at f/3.5 there is not much you can do with DOF. Maybe a different angle to get the sky to the background or using longer shutter speed + panning to get the background blurred.</p>

<p>One more additional detail: Out of eight additional test pictures that I tool in Live View mode seven were focused exactly correctly and one was 90mm front focused. Hmmm, what does that tell us?? </p>

<p>I did another test, with slightly more "scientific" methods, just to eliminate human errors from the analysis. See http://www.vanhalat.net/D90/fokusongelma.html for details.</p>

<p>I was not able to reproduce the 20cm front focus, but there was one test image with about 12cm front focus, which is bad enough.</p>

<p>When focusing from near to far, there seemed to be fairly consistent 90-110mm front focus in all pictures. When focusing from far to near, resustls were much more random: maybe about 40mm - 120mm front focus.</p>

<p>So there obviously is a front focus problem in the lens(?), which may be just an calibration issue. But what about the 80 mm variation in the latter part of the test? That is big enough error to throw subject out of focus with very shallow DOF, but is that still in the acceptable range? What level of accuracy can be considered acceptable?</p>

<p>I have had D90 for some three months now, and I have been quite happy with the performance. I use mostly the 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor with it, and AF accuracy has been good.<br>

Recently I have taken some pictures with my ~3.5 year old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4m and subject has been often slightly out of focus especially when shooting wide open or in the f1.4 - f2.8 range. First I thought this was just me missing the focus point, but based on recent tests I did, it seems to be the camera/lens combo causing the problem.<br>

After taking a series of test pictures I can see the focus being somewhere 0-20 cm in front of the target. Error seems to be fairly random, but it seems that it is worse when lens has to focus from shorter end to longer end. Sometime focus is where it should be, but that is not very often.<br>

20cm error in the f2.8 or wider apertures takes the main subject completely out of the focus area, so this is really an annoying problem. I have here one test picture captured from viewNX with focus point indicator on. Picture is taken at f1.4, so the depth of field is really narrow.<br>

<img src="http://www.vanhalat.net/image/frontFocus.jpg" alt="" /><br>

I did not notice this problem with this lens when I was using it with my F100, but that was some two and a half years ago.<br>

Which one would you think is to blame on this - the camera body or the lens? What do you think could be causing this?</p>

<p>I have had some mixed results with the dynamic AF mode in my D90. (Yes, I know D90 does not have the same AF engine as D300, but I suspect this is not a D90 specific issue)<br>

When I was shooting in one motor sports event, many of my pictures were focused in the background advertisements instead of the main subject. I had the middle focusing point selected and camera on Dynamic Area AF. The most problematic pictures were in this type of situations:<br>

<img src="http://jvanhala.galleria.fi/kuvat/MSP+Legends+Ice+2009/DSC_1432.jpg/_smaller.jpg" alt="" /><br>

This picture was OK, but in many pics the high contrast adds on the background triggered the dynamic AF to choose one of the focus points that was not on the main subject. Has anyone else had this problem?<br>

D90 has the Dynamic area AF as the default setting for sports instead of the 3D tracking. I wonder why that is? If I have understood correctly, 3D tracking uses also the color information for tracking the subject, and in this case it might have had better results. Is there a performance penalty in 3D tracking of why would one choose Dynamic area over 3D?</p>

<p>Hi Preston,<br>

I had recently very similar photoshoot opportunity. This was the first time for me as well, so I'm by no means an expert on this, but for sure this was a good learning opportunity for me. I'm, by the way, using D90 which has the same sensor ad D300, so I think there may be similarities in the picture quality. I was certainly happy with D90 performance, so I think you should be able to get good pics with your D300 as well. Even ISO 3200 performed surpricingly well with D90.</p>

<p>I had also big problems with red light. In those parts of the stage where the singer was just below the light, red channel simply oversaturated beyond repair. See example here: http://www.vanhalat.net/image/DSC_1745_pun.jpg . Those shots I had to convert B&W to make them usable. I found light Sepia toning working pretty well with my pictures.</p>

<p>I shot my pictures in RAW format, and I think that was definitely the only way to get anything usefull out of the pictures. I use Nikon Capture NX2 to edit the RAW files, and with that I could get reasonable results for color and contrast.</p>

<p>Has anyone tried using blue filters in band shoots? I have one spare 80B from the film era and I was wondering if that would cut some of the excessive red out of the pictures. Obviously that could work only in places where they have red light only.</p>

<p>You can see some of the shots from my band night here: http://jvanhala.galleria.fi/kuvat/MuteRock+2009/</p>