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January 18, 2012

Quick Review: SB-910

Specs and purchasing info

As a longtime Nikonian, it still seems a bit odd that Nikon is known as the “great high ISO camera company.” Back in my day, we had noisy ISO 800, and walked uphill both ways to the photo shoot! But that was OK, because we were flashers. Our Nikons had fantastic flash control, TTL metering that worked extremely well, and we made due.

And then everything changed. Along came the Nikon D3, and our SB-800s changed into SB-900s. Not everyone was a fan of this — the SB-900 was significantly larger but didn’t have more power — but I liked them enough to buy three. Fully rotational flash heads is a big deal to my bounce-loving self, and I never quite got used to the fact that you had to physically break the SB-800 to make it work properly.

So I had the SB-900, and everything was good. The output was great, the TTL worked well in those rare cases I wasn’t being a manual-using control freak, and I especially adored the ability to zoom the flash head to a narrow beam of 200mm. Because it’s a narrow beam, I can bounce strong pulses into the ceiling and not use much power, giving me more charge and better recycling time.

There were only a few quirks, some of which bothered me and some of which didn’t. The one that everyone talked about is that out of the box, the SB-900 has an overzealous Thermal Cut-Off protection program that, after a few strong flash pulses, essentially says “No! It’s too hot in here! No flashes for you!” This, I agree, is terrible — so I turned it off and never thought about it again. As someone who’s fired hundreds of thousands of pulses through SB-900s, my experience is that unless you’re using some super-jacked batteries or third-party battery packs, you’re not going to melt anything down. If you find yourself firing your flash at 1/1 all the time, you might want to take a hard look at your gear or compositional choices.

Other things that no one talked about much bothered me a bit more. The new gel system, which used coding to automatically change white balance, was pretty cool but a bit tricky to find and slide on in the field. There was that darned menu access, which was better than the SB-800s but still took time and some slight-of-hand to get to the settings. And the one that really got me is that the infrared AF-assist beam seemed to be mis-aligned in some ways, so that if you were shooting a shallow-depth-of-field lens like the 85mm f/1.4 on a dark dance floor, and using the AF assist on any focus point other than the center point, you were almost guaranteed to have your shot be out-of-focus.

So here’s all you really need to know: The SB-910 fixes all of these quirks. They use the same sort of snap-on gels as the SB-700, which are harder to pack but work great. The Thermal Cut-off gradually slows the flash down as it gets hot instead of getting all Soup Nazi with you. (You can see an oh-so-exciting video of me firing the SB-910 at full power here.) They even fixed the AF assist, which is attention to detail surprising even for Nikon. Awesome.

RKB 2495

It also adds some things like illuminated buttons (which will nicely match the Nikon D4 buttons) and a revamped menu system to be more like the SB-700. Illuminated buttons don’t matter much to me — after two days shooting with a piece of kit the buttons are mapped in my brain, no looking required. The dedicated menu button is fantastic for working quickly, but it has a downside: If you have a bunch of SB-900s, you will probably want to sell them if you’re tempted by the 910. These two flashes are so similar in basic form that you will never remember by simple touch which is which — and they have buttons in the same places that do entirely different things. Give your brain a break and try not to limit your time mixing these two in your system.

In the photos above, I wanted to use the tungsten gel given that it’s now easy enough to put on that I won’t say “Oh, forget it.” In both, I fired through a Lumiquest LTP softbox. At left, I got the double-diffusion softness and made use of a tight spot by skipping the light off a white door to the left. At right, the light from the right, combined with a tweak of the automatically cool white balance the camera knew to give me thanks to the coded gel, gives a more complicated and moody mix of warm flash and cool ambient. Is there any real difference in the light between this and the SB-900, or even the SB-700? No. But I probably would have never fished the delicate SB-900 gels out of my bag on a freezing cold day — so the real answer is whatever works for you. And the SB-910 works really well.

January 9, 2012

Review: Nikon J1 versus Fuji X10

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Compact camera photos aren’t what they used to be. Taken with the Nikon J1 and kit lens.

Specs and Purchase info: Nikon J1

Specs and Purchase info: Fuji X10

The compact world is in a bit of a stir right now. Heck, all you need to do is read the news today, with Canon’s release of a compact camera with a DSLR-sized sensor. After years and years of advanced amateurs and professionals saying “Wake, up guys! The compact cameras are uninspired and terrible — you need to shake it up!” the companies are finally listening. Why?

Phones.

Simply put, there is no reason for anyone to buy a bad digital compact again. They’re already carrying something around in their pocket that does the job of a bad digital camera — and some of them, like the iPhone 4s or Samsung Galaxy SII, can play the part of a pretty decent compact. The entire lower end of that market is in deep, deep trouble, and they know it. So what they’re finally starting to focus on are compacts that can do things your phones can’t. Use flash well. Shoot in lower light. Shoot RAW. And in Nikon’s case, use interchangeable lenses.

Nikon and Fuji are showing two different approaches to this market, with Nikon heavily touting their new J1 and V1 lines, with a bigger-than-compact-but-still-small sensor that allows for a smaller system overall. Fuji had a hit with the X100, and they’re hoping to replicate it on a smaller scale with the compact, zooming X10.

Now, as a professional Nikon user, my initial gut reaction to the J1 was disappointment. I know from the X100 that mirrorless options can be helpful in even the most professional systems, and I was hoping for something that would change my working environment. The J1 isn’t designed for work — it’s for fun. It’s about being a compact camera with somewhat better photos and having the versatility of interchangeable lenses. And then something got my attention — people who used it, other people who had been disappointed, started singing its praises. That little-but-not-too-little sensor seemed to be quite a workhorse. So I got my hands on one to pair with the X10 I was testing and headed out to Hong Kong.

I put up some preview images yesterday, and everyone assumed I was testing the Canon 1DX versus Nikon D4. It wasn’t my intention to trick anyone — I want to really put the D4 through its paces before I write a review, but I suppose that speaks well for these cameras.

The X10 is the simpler camera to describe: it’s just a compact, but a nice one. It has a nice zoom range from medium wide-angle to short telephoto (“portrait length”), and you zoom manually by turning the ring, not from moving some wonky switch like most compacts. It zooms smoothly as you turn, more smoothly than cameras like the Canon S100 that try the same trick. Its zoom range also starts at a nice and fast f/2 and only closes down to f/2.8 at the long end. It has an optical viewfinder, but it’s of the only-for-emergencies compact camera style, not anything like its big brother the X100.

Essentially, the X10 changes nothing radical about the idea of what a compact camera is, but they bring impeccable style and functionality to the design — and that makes all the difference. It’s a pleasure to use in a way that was almost unthinkable for a compact from about 2002-2009. In true Fuji style is produces nice, colorful images with good skin tones, and a noticeable love for magenta:

One thing to note about the X10: Like a good number of compacts these days, it cheats even with its RAW files, writing in instructions to clean up extreme barrel distortion and vignetting. Companies like Panasonic have done this a lot, and it’s dramatic to see what happens when you open the same files in a program that listens to those instructions (such as Adobe Lightroom) versus one that doesn’t (like Apple’s Aperture.) Here is the same photo from Lightroom on the left and Aperture on the right — no adjustments:

You can see Lightroom left in a little bit of the distortion to not change the frame too radically, but especially with this sort of composition the one on the right (which reflects how the lens actually captures the scene) looks almost like it was taken with a fisheye.

But it’s a good camera overall, and great at low-light for a compact. Here’s an ISO 1600 image — a bit painterly noise reduction in places, but still sharp and with good detail:

The J1 confirmed a good number of my worst feelings when I first picked it up — this is made for consumers, not a tool for professionals to use on the side. All you need to know is that Nikon, the Kings of Strobism, didn’t put a hot shoe on it. They clearly put thought into making this just something to capture snapshots and home video better than a phone can. And so the video side is well-thought-out, with a separate button for video capture and a slow-motion mode that really works, although it has low resolution and a long aspect ratio.

On the face, it seems to not quite realize the advantages of the small sensor. The camera is small but not THAT small — the APS-C-sensored NEX-5n is smaller. The optics are still just as slow as they’d be on a bigger DSLR — the kit lens I used was f/3.5-5.6. When you compare that to the f/2 to f/2.8 lens the Fuji had, suddenly you seem to be giving up the gains that the bigger sensor gives you.

But then I started seeing the images. And they looked good. Crisp and clear and with vibrant but realistic color — better than what I’d gotten from a compact before, even a well-designed one like the X10. High ISO is surprisingly good. Good enough that although I wanted to use these cameras for their intended market of vacation snapshots, I even used it for clients — the image at top is ISO 800, which was enough to capture a night-time scene with very little noise and sharpness and detail preserved. In that case, the design came in handy, since I wanted the “infinite depth-of-field” look that I would have had to stop WAY down on my D3s to get.

Here’s a few more images showing that it’s crisp and sharp and handles contrast well:

Perhaps Nikon is reaping the advantage of low expectations, since the camera is more enjoyable to use than it appears on paper. I think the full promise of this system will come with the adapters, where the 2.7x crop will turn telephoto lenses into “photograph a songbird’s eyeball” lenses. But something like a 20mm f/2 would be a nice addition to the lens line-up, as even amateurs expect nice results in terrible light these days.

Since these are similar price (with the J1′s kit lens), this is going to come down to personal preference, especially given all of the other compeition for this marketplace. But it’s heartening to see how many more great choices we have now than the dark ages of compact camera design.

Specs and Purchase info: Nikon J1

Specs and Purchase info: Fuji X10

Tags: fuji x10, nikon j1

January 2, 2012

Review: LensAlign, Spyder LensCal and the importance of AF Fine Tune

Get your f/1.2 photos in perfect focus

Cameras come with lots and lots of bells and whistles these days, and some of them seem a lot more useful than other. Built-in selective color mode? No thank you. But every once in a while there’s a new feature that changes the game in a big way. Autofocus. Auto-exposure modes. Vibration reduction. To my mind, autofocus fine-tuning is one of these. What is this? Nikon calls it “AF Fine Tune,” and Canon calls it “Focus Micro-Adjust,” but basically it’s simple, and brilliant: It allows your camera to make sure your autofocus actually works up to its full potential.

Lens design is an incredibly complicated process, and like anything in life we can’t aim for perfection, just good enough. The problem is compounded because different cameras, even of the same model, respond to lenses slightly differently, and the lens-maker doesn’t have access to your camera when calibrating in the factory. Generally, most good companies produce results that are, to use a scientific term, good enough for Rock ‘n’ Roll. If you’re taking photos at f/8, it’s highly unlikely you’d ever notice a problem. But especially these days where it’s more and more fashionable to shoot with the razor-thin DoF of f/1.8 or wider, little problems become glaring. If a lens if off by even a couple millimeters, that can be the difference between an eye and an eyelash in focus. An inch? Then it’s the nose in focus, and you’re noticeably off.

In the old days, you were pretty stuck. All you could do is send the lens back to the factory and hope for the best, or actually travel to a lens technician and have them re-calibrate it to your camera. Message boards are filled with horror stories of people who sent a lens back five or six times and still couldn’t get it working right.

But a few years ago, dSLR makers figured out how to change the variances a little bit in-camera. Is the nose in-focus instead of the eye? You can tell the camera to move back an inch with that particular lens. Is the focus going back to the ear? Tell the lens to focus forward a bit. Suddenly, that slightly annoying fast lens you couldn’t quite get right becomes a useful tool. Batches of lenses that had wide reports of focus quality control-issues, like some of the wide, fast Sigma lenses such as the 24mm f/1.8, work just fine, thank you very much.

Perhaps because these work best with fast, professional lenses, and because it’s a bit tricky to get working properly, most camera-makers include this feature at the “advanced amateur” level and beyond. For instance, Nikon has it on the D300s but not the D90 (though they did include it on the D7000), and Canon has it on the 7D but not the D60. It’s such an incredibly useful feature that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it buried in menus with a “WARNING: Only touch if you know what you’re doing!” on even the most basic DSLR models in the future.

The basic working of it is extremely similar across camera lines. Go into the camera function menu with your problematic lens mounted, and you’ll see a chart with pluses and minuses radiating out from zero. These allow you to correct for front- or back-focus to varying degrees. Because modern lenses have CPU chips in them, the camera will even be able to tell two lenses of the same model apart. This is crucial because, to paraphrase Tolstoy: “All perfect lenses are alike; each imperfect lens is imperfect in its own way.”

But the catch is that there’s no automatic way to do this. If there was, the camera could just fix the problem without a chart. Basically you need to shoot, figure out the amount of front-focus or back-focus. And then shoot again and see if your calculations were correct. And most importantly, you want to absolutely make sure that none of the focus problems are due to user error, or just the tricky act of hitting a precise target at f/1.4

If this sounds like a complicated, frustrating process, well … it can be, especially if you have a lot of lenses … even more so if you have to test all of them with multiple cameras. And so a few companies have stepped in with products to make the process easier. I tested both the LensAlign system and Spyder LensCal with a variety of lenses on my Nikon D3s bodies, as well as the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 on the Canon 7D, since a number of people have reported back-focus on this lens with Canon bodies.

Both of these products are trying to perform a very simple task in an effective way, which is to be a good autofocus target and and effective measuring system that will let you see exactly where the plane of focus falls. There are only so many possible configurations for this, and so you can see that when set up they look very similar (LensAlign on left; LensCal on right):

To eliminate user error, when setting up for use you should use a tripod exactly level with the target so your lens is at a perfect perpendicular. Now, a good lens should be distance-calibrated, meaning that if it focuses accurately at five feet it should focus accurately at 10 feet, but that’s not always the case so I tended to set the lens at the distance I most often shoot with it (closer for the 24mm f/1.4, farther for the 85mm f/1.4, and so on). This also made sure that the lens had a big enough target to focus on, since hitting these from 10 feet away with a 24mm lens won’t be as accurate as you want it to be.

As you can see, in use these are extremely similar. The LensAlign chart has a lot more to it, which can make it easier to set up a perfectly accurate test. In particular the second bullseye on the right can help you make sure you’re exactly perpendicular, as you’ll want both targets to be tack sharp. But the bells and whistles come at a price. The Spyder is extremely simple to set up. It starts like this:

You unsnap it and voila! Done. In contrast, the LensAlign comes like this:

And here are the directions to put it together:

If you are someone who gets thrown into a murderous rage by Ikea furniture, you might prefer the Spyder.

And of course there is the third option of doing it on your own — which at least is better than nothing. One decent trick is to put a coin on a towel or shag rug and focus on that — the threads of the towel will really show exactly where the focus plane is falling — and in all cases remember that it gets much more accurate as you zoom in on the picture, thanks to the circle of confusion.

If you have just a kit lens, you probably don’t have to worry. If you have one camera and a 50mm f/1.8, you can probably muddle through yourself. But for me, calibrating almost 20 lenses on two D3s’s and a D3, these were invaluable tools. I’ve had lenses rescued from the scrap heap because of focus micro-adjust. If you like shallow depth-of-field or think that you will in the future, this is a feature to watch out for as you buy a camera. It’s not a bad reason to pick up a D7000 over a D90, for example.

Virtually every one of my lenses was improved by this, though in many of the cases it wouldn’t be noticeable in normal usage.

Specs and purchase info:
Spyder LensCal
LensAlign

Tags: af fine tune, equipment, equipment review, focus micro-adjust, lensalign, lenscal

November 22, 2011

Review: Sigma 12-24mm Mark II

Specs and Pricing info

This summer, I looked at the gear I tended to use for weddings — never wider than 24mm, dominated by f/1.4 or f/1.2 primes — and said “Ok, let’s shake this up a bit.” So I chose the Sigma 12-24mm, which on a full-frame camera gives as wide a rectilinear frame as any lens for any system — a 122-degree frame of view. To go wider than that, you have to go fisheye. Moreover, the lens is one of the least light-sensitive professional lenses around — it starts at f/4.5 at the wide end, but if you want to zoom you should just consider it an f/5.6 lens, only letting in 1/16th the light of my 24mm f/1.4.

I’d been having a blast with it, working with new possibilities and limitations, when my pals at B&H asked me if I wanted to review the new version Sigma was releasing. Absolutely — the Mark I Sigma is extremely fun but more than a little quirky, and to get solid performance out of it you generally want to be in the f/11 range, severely limiting use as an indoor available-light lens. I figured the new lens would be more or less identical, but with some new coatings, a bit of new glass, but no major changes.

Then I opened the box. The new lens, even though it has the same basic specs, felt totally different. It’s longer, leaner, and with a wider rear element (the Mark I’s is strangely small). It felt sturdier in the hand, and I could immediately see an improvement in sharpness and vignetting wide-open. This doesn’t mean it’s optically perfect at f/4.5, but it does become more than usable — a real optical challenge at this frame of view.

I don’t often shoot blank walls, but this comparison tells the tale quite well. Below are photos taken with the old and new versions at 12mm f/4.5 with the same 1/4th power bounce flash off a white ceiling, on the left and right respectively:

Enough said. The white wall shows a far more dramatic result than most real-world applications, but when you look at the Mark I photo, the vignetting is so dramatic that you think you might have put a DX lens on your camera by mistake. Some of the vignetting on the left of the Mark II photo may be from the directionality of the flash combined with the extreme angle of view, but even then the falloff is far more gradual.

Also, the difference in color is interesting, given that these were taken with the same flash at the same intensity, in “Flash” white balance setting. The older Sigma seems to have a turquoise cast to it, especially in the vignette. Now, of course lots of photographers pay lots of money for Photoshop actions to create vignetting that looks sort of like that, so there’s no saying what’s better. But I strongly prefer the new version.

In terms of basic usage, it’s hard to tell any difference between the two, because a lens set to 12mm f/5.6 has such a deep depth-of-field already that autofocus is almost an afterthought. If you love bokeh in all of your images, this isn’t the lens for you.

But what sort of things IS this lens good for? Well, it’s wide. Really, really, really wide. So wide that anyone placed near the corners of its pictures looks like Jabba the Hutt. Like with a fisheye, shooting at 12mm is generally something you’ll want to do sparingly, but when used right it can give really dramatic accents.

For instance, it’s hard to find a better lens to show off the interior of a particularly ornate church:

And while subjects too close to you or too close to the edges of the frame will look clownish, with the right placing you can get a great deal of a scene in the frame without looking crazy. Here you can see a lot of the scene, including the same little peninsula I’m standing on, but it doesn’t scream “Crazy wide!!”

And the same here, because the human elements are close to the center of the frame:

The real strength of it is to see commonplace scenes in very different ways. Because it’s so wide, every parallel line instead becomes something converging toward a perspective — which might drive architects crazy, but can also make for interesting compositions:

Not to mention the sort of “reverse compression,” where your subjects can fit into any frame or arch or space that would normally be too large:

Sigma has done a greg job with the revamp of this lens — there are always going to be lots of challenges from shooting ultra, ultra-wide, but with the new model at least the challenges are just coming from perspective instead of lens design.

If this sounds up your alley, purchase it here.

Tags: equipment review

November 7, 2011

Review: Sony NEX-5n

For my needs, at least, dSLRs have reached a tipping point. With the release of Canon 1D-X and Nikon having the still-astonishing D3s, the major workhorse companies are both now producing cameras as good as I could possibly want them to be. Can I imagine better? Very easily, but in most ways the improvements are so far up the curve of diminishing returns to be irrelevant. Yes, one day we’ll have cameras that shoot at ISO 1,000,000 — but that doesn’t matter so much when ISO 10,000 allows me to shoot moving people at the very limits of what my own eyes can actually see.

But these systems do have one problem — they’re freaking huge. I’m writing this from airports in Aruba, Miami, and New Orleans, and the whole way I’ve been lugging a 45-pound backpack of camera gear. In one of the tiny side pockets, taking up less space than any of my autofocus lenses? Sony’s latest mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera, the NEX-5n.

Even though the NEX-5n is an update to the “lesser” of Sony’s NEX cameras, it’s been getting a lot of attention, and for good reason. First, like the NEX 5 before it, it’s small. REALLY small. “Glorified lens cap” small. Even though it has an APS-C-sized sensor, as big as the sensors in all but the highest-end DSLRs, its body is no bigger than a point and shoot, especially when paired with the 16mm f/2.8 pancake lens. But because of how close the sensor is to the mount, you can use adapters to put lenses from almost any system on it (at least if you don’t mind losing autofocus.) So it can be as small or as big as you want it to be :

Sony made a couple of improvements over the NEX 5 that seem small at first, but make the camera a surprising joy to use. First is the addition of a touch-screen, which to smartphone addicts makes menu-diving a lot easier, especially when the camera has a small lens mounted. (The trade-off is that you have to do menu-diving for things that I’d rather have be represented by physical dials, such as changing modes, ISO, and white balance.) The second is the support of an optional electronic viewfinder. My need for a good viewfinder is one of the reasons I’d never considered a NEX 5 as an alternative to my Fuji X100, and the articulating high-resolution viewfinder is a joy to use (though it adds to the overall price).

Lastly, they changed the sensor to the same base design that has been praised in the Nikon D7000 for its great color and low noise — competing strongly against the Nikon D700 and 5D Mark II even though it has less than half the light-gathering area! Since the viewfinder allows extremely accurate focusing with wide-aperture lenses and in dark situations presents an image brighter than your eyes can easily see, when you put an f/1.4 or f/1.2 lens on this camera you have a still fairly-compact camera that can absolutely see in the dark. Here, paired with a 58mm f/1.2 Noct-Nikkor, the NEX 5n could easily photograph a street musician sitting in shadow in the dead of night (ISO 2000):

If “workhorse dSLRs” have reached maturity, mirrorless cameras are still in their awkward teens: They have so much potential, but each one brings their own quirks. The 5n is no exception — at different times it left me jumping around excitedly and scratching my head in frustration.

This is the fundamental temptation of the system for me: Since the viewfinder makes manual-focus so easy and accurate except for tracking irregular movement, and since you can put almost ANY lens on this camera with an adapter, I can have a camera that is as simple and compact or as versatile as I need in most situations. With the 16mm pancake I have a point and shoot with great manual control and good performance at medium apertures (it’s not bad wide-open, but nothing to write home about).

Then I can add the E-mount 55-210mm zoom lens, which is about the size and shape of a Red Bull can, and get decent telephoto in a compact kit (at least if you leave off the hood). The 55-210 is a slow lens, being only f/6.3 at the long end, so the ISO capability will help here a lot.

I actually shot this from a fast-moving speedboat, using the “reduce motion blur” function that shoots 10 frames in a second and picks the least blurry one. Generally not my favorite gimmick, since I like to choose my favorite frame, but you never know when you’ll be shooting at 315mm-equivalent from the side of a speedboat.

THEN, of course, I can add an adapter and put on Nikon lenses. With a more pixel-dense sensor, this is a better macro camera than my D3s, paired with the 60mm f/2.8 G:

With the 45mm f/2.8 PC-E, I can create tilt-shift images without a big camera hanging on my neck (select lenses can fit in my small shoulder bag, but my D3s sure can’t):

And with my 58mm f/1.2, I can capture scenes in almost no light at all (and can easily see them with the EVF viewfinder). This was at ISO 3200, f/1.2, 1/8th of a second:

So it’s all amazing, right? Well, like I said, these systems are still in their awkward teenager phase. Most glaring is the flash system. Instead of a normal hot-shoe, it has some proprietary weirdness that makes third-party flashes impossible, and if you’re using that separate viewfinder I like so much, then you can’t use any sort of flash at all! This is essentially the anti-Strobist camera. Also the viewfinder adds to the cost and keeps it from being truly pocketable, so you’ll need to decide whether it’s worth it for you (for me, it is).

The other big thing is that, compared to the competing Micro-4/3rds standard, the current lens system is deeply underwhelming. The only truly compact lens is the 16mm f/2.8, and it’s a decent but not stellar performer. Sony has committed to a lot more lenses coming soon, including a Zeiss 24mm I’m excited about. That lens alone would make this camera a strong competitor against the Fuji X100, but it won’t be cheap.

So the system will continue to grow and strengthen throughout the next year, but the mirrorless competitors aren’t being quiet. Just today, Panasonic released the GX1, which looks like a really strong camera, and Fuji is currently developing a professional mirrorless system that should have an even bigger sensor than the NEX cameras. If you don’t need professional flash, enjoy manual focus, and want a versatile system with a bigger sensor than micro-4/3rds, this camera might be for you, and it has a lot of happy new owners. But it will also be very interesting to see where we are in a year from now, and some of those awkward teenage quirks have gone away.

MORE IMAGES:

16mm f/2.8 (three-image pano)

55-210mm:

35mm f/1.4, 30-second exposure:

16mm f/2.8 “sweep pano” mode:

Tags: 16mm f/2.8 review, 55-210mm review, nex-5n review, sony nex review, sony nex-5n

October 7, 2011

Review: Hasselblad 100mm f/2.2 (and thoughts on Hasselbad H2F)

Pretty much any photographer I’ve ever met has “dream gear,” stuff they keep their eye on. When the Nikon D2X came out, I used a picture of it as my desktop background for months, just to keep me pounding the pavement. Lots of hard work has meant that my basic “work bag” has pretty much everything in it I could need, so my wandering eye turns toward luxurious items that would be fun to use, but are outside my core body of work. A Leica M9 with a 50mm f/0.95 Noctilux? Yes please.

For years, one target of my lust were wide-aperture medium format lenses. There’s generally a big size and weight jump from 35mm cameras to 645 and larger camera systems, and so most lenses have smaller apertures — in medium format, f/4 lenses can be considered fast. But the larger image field means that you can get very shallow depth-of-field at these smaller apertures … so if you put a truly wide aperture lens on it, you can combine extremely shallow depth-of-field with the clarity and resolution of medium format. There are a lot of options for this, but I’ve been curious about the Hasselblad 100mm f/2.2 ever since its release. It’s part of the Hasselblad H system, which can be as old- or new-school as you want it to be, integrating easily with digital backs and auto-focus ready. It’s also still in production and easier to rent than a lot of other systems. Finally, the Hasselblad HC lenses were controversial when they came out, since they were made by Fuji, not part of Hasselblad’s traditional partnership with Zeiss. Those are some awfully big shoes to fill.

I wanted to test this lens on film for a few reasons, so I used the Hasselblad H2F. First, film is fun. But more importantly, all medium format digital backs have a crop factor compared to 645 film, and I believe that if you really want to get to know a lens, you should see as much of its imaging circle as you can. And, of course, a crop factor limits depth-of-field control, the main reason I’d want to shoot wide aperture on medium format in the first place. The Hasselblad H4D-60 has gotten really close to the usable area of 645 film, but it also costs more than my annual rent … and I live in midtown Manhattan.

On film, the 100mm f/2.2 has a similar depth-of-field profile to what a 60mm f/1.3 would on 35mm — quite similar to my 58mm f/1.2 Noct-Nikkor, so I spent some time shooting them together on the same assignments. The image below shows the Hasselblad 100mm in between my Nikon 105mm f/1.8 (similar focal length and aperture) and the Noct (similar output on a given system). You can see that despite the big difference in the imaging circle (which makes the Hasselblad lenses very fat), and the fact that the 100mm is autofocus and the Nikon lenses are manual-focus, the 100mm isn’t unnecessarily huge or unwieldy.

In the field: The Hasselblad H system is definitely optimized for studio and landscape. The shutter is in the lens itself, which means that you can sync your flash with it up to 1/800th of a second (very good!), but it also means that 1/800th of a second is the maximum shutter speed at all (very bad!). I had to be very careful with what film I put in at what times, especially since I wanted to shoot mostly wide-open. With the giant slapping mirror of the Hasselblad, I was loath to shoot below 1/100th of a second — which meant that at a given aperture and film speed, I only had three stops of possible light that would give me a correct exposure! Proper field use definitely required foresight and a light meter was helpful, even the Light Meter app on my iPhone.

Despite being outside of the camera’s comfort zone, it performed beautifully overall. It is so solid and ergonomically sound that even my Nikon D3s started to feel a bit toylike in comparison. It didn’t take me long to get used to the controls, which were intuitively laid out for general use. And the viewfinder … or dear lord, how I love the viewfinder. It felt like I was actually seeing the picture in front of me at all times, in the way it would finally look in print. I felt like I could crawl inside and live there. Between the size of the finder and the fact that you are getting all of this depth-of-field gorgeousness at f/2.2 instead of f/1.2, there is a HUGE difference between shooting this in practice and the D3s + the Noct. The D3s viewfinder doesn’t show anything close to the true depth-of-field of an f/1.2 lens, so you never really know what’s in focus. Live View tends to be the way to go for extended use, and that brings with it a bit of shutter delay. With the Hasselblad, I could see exactly which eyelash was in focus and which wasn’t. It never bothered me that I couldn’t look at the back of the camera to see what the picture looked like, because as long as the exposure was dead-on, I already knew.

As I said before, the Hasselblad H system is as modern as you want it to be. It actually says in the manual that after you put it together, “the camera is now ready to use as a point-and-shoot!” No lie. And the metering system, which uses matrix, center, or spot-metering, seemed dead-on accurate with proper usage. The autofocus system was also surprisingly zippy, given the weight of the lens elements to be moved around. However, there is only ONE autofocus point, so you are stuck focusing and re-composing. More recent Hasselblads have a unique system that actually corrects for the focusing errors that focus-and-re-compose can bring about, but not the H2. But the viewfinder is so good that you can actually see the focal plane shift, and adjust for it as necessary. Because the camera made precision so easy, I ignored the modern features most of the time and used a light meter and manual focus, but I kept checking the automatic systems to see if they were giving me accurate results. They did a great job.

The look of the lens:

As mentioned before, the basic depth-of-field profile is very similar to the Noct-Nikkor (with the Noct taking it by a hair), and it is quite adept at knocking out backgrounds. In the photo above on the left, we were extremely limited about shooting locations at the time, but the 100mm allows the eye to focus on the gorgeous bride and her great expression instead of the houses and cars on the streets behind. And closer up for the bouquet the transition from razor-sharp to out-of-focus is dramatic and pleasing.

But there are as many differences as similarities:

We have Valerie in the photo above with the Hasselblad 100mm on the left and the Noct-Nikkor on the right. This is not the sort of shot that would show off vignetting, but even so you can still see it dramatically in the lower-left of the Noct photo. The Noct has deeply imperfect corners in terms of sharpness and vignetting (which is perfectly fine for my portraiture uses). Given that I was shooting on film (with no crop factor), I expected some of the same from the Hasselblad, but it was virtually nowhere to be found! Even wide-open the sides and corners are sharp and clear. It made me glad I was shooting film, because it could otherwise appear so perfect as to be clinical (though of course it’s easy to add vignetting in post, if you like to).

I could see this being a perfect setup for a digital studio. The lens focuses as close as you need it to for portraiture, and the focal length is an in-between that can feel like a normal or a telephoto depending on your perspective. It gives stunning results at any aperture, and starting so wide means that if you need to stop down to resolve the 60 megapixels of an H4D-60, you might only be at f/5.6 instead of f/11. The hood is metal and sturdy and the diameter is 77mm, so professional dSLR shooters will probably have all sorts of filters they can use on it (and good ND filters will come in handy in the field when the sun comes out).

I had way too much fun with this. I am sure this will not be my last time playing with this set-up.

More photos:

Tags: hasselblad, hasselblad 100mm f/2.2, medium format review

September 13, 2011

Quick Review: Nikon 40mm f/2.8 Micro DX

Specs and Pricing Info

So much new camera gear comes out all the time that my first thought at any new release is “Could this possibly be useful to me?” If not, I tend to not pay it much attention — such as the endless string of seemingly cloned compact cameras. Since all of my DSLR work is done on full-frame cameras, I haven’t paid too much attention to Nikon’s DX lineup for a while. And it’s a shame, since they’re still doing interesting things in that area. I know I wish that in my DX days I’d had access to newer designs like the 10-24mm.

But it got my attention that Nikon had recently released not one, but two DX-specific macro lenses, the 85mm f/3.5 and the 40mm f/2.8. I’d heard enough chatter to know that people were slightly disappointed by the 85mm’s sharpness (important for a macro) and slow maximum aperture, but I thought that if Nikon had done a good job with the 40mm, they might have a hit on their hands. As I mentioned in my review of the Sigma 150mm OS Macro, my close-up work tends to be of things that are not alive and do not move, and a short focal length makes that easier in some ways. I love the heck out of my Nikon 60mm AF-S Micro, and this new lens seems to serve the same niche for DX shooters at less size and weight and half the cost.

The first thing you notice when you open the box is how small the lens is. Like the 50mm f/1.8, you can barely feel the weight in your hand. The 60mm Macro isn’t exactly a monster itself, but given that both of these lenses have the same frame of view on their respective systems, you can see the size advantage that the DX frame gives in a comparison of the two with the hood and without:

I’ve also noticed on both this and the 50mm that Nikon has greatly increased the size of the lens mount marker on their new lenses and cameras. It will be interesting to see if they do this on new professional bodies, because while useful it also has just a bit of a Fisher-Price feel to it:

But the really important thing is “How does it perform?” Can it stand up to the 60mm, which is an amazingly sharp macro with great rendering? To properly test it, B&H also loaned me a great DX camera, the Nikon D7000. I don’t have enough use with that camera to review it properly, but I will say that its video functions run circles around my Nikon D3s‘s, and it was alarmingly fun to use.

DX cameras also have an inherent advantage in macro work. We generally call true macros anything that renders 1:1, which means that they can take a photo of an area the same size as their sensor. The larger the sensor, though, the less tiny that is. For maximum resolution of a tiny scene, it helps to have a small sensor crammed in with pixels. For most uses, the giant pixels on the D3s will give you less noise and greater dynamic range than the smaller ones on the D7000, but the D7000 is overall a much better macro camera.

Here we have the same rings photographed by the 40mm on the D7000 and the 60mm on the D3s, both at f/16. Which is which? The great news is that it’s really hard to tell — if I didn’t have the EXIF I wouldn’t be able to. (The 40mm is on the left).

But almost any lens is limited by diffraction at f/16, not the lens qualities themselves, so let’s look at the 40mm wide-open. The shot below, from the D7000, is a bigger magnification than is possible with the 60mm + D3s combo:

Depth-of-field is extremely shallow here, but a 100 percent crop will show how sharp this lens is wide-open — perhaps TOO sharp for a ring that’s seen better days:

There’s a bit of a false haze that comes from the way I lit this subject, and is similar in both lenses, so let’s look at another, cuter subject. I figure a $280 DX lens is going to see a lot of cat pictures, so I beat you to it:

This close-up of the side of a soda bottle says a lot about the lens’s character, good and bad, because the highlight-filled edges curve out of the focal plane and the high contrast shows a bit of magenta and green making an appearance:

But if you want to pixel-peep boring photos? Because I didn’t use this much on professional shoots, just this one I’m happy to oblige. For the pixel peepers, I took shots of a cereal box at f/8 and wide-open. Clicking those links will download the full-res JPG. But it’s just a cereal box (and not even my favorite cereal), so I’ll give you spoilers: It’s sharp.

This shot shows more of the DoF and contrast rendering, as well as some classy gear:

And there’s a little surprise as well: That is a full-frame capture from my D3s. Yes, at close-up distances the vignetting goes away even on a full-frame camera, disappearing almost completely when you stop down. I wouldn’t recommend this lens for full-frame users, but it means you can be quite sure you aren’t going to see any vignetting at all with a stopped-down image on a DX frame.

Light, small, cheap, sharp, and well-behaved across the frame? If I were a DX shooter I’d snap this up immediately.

Tags: equipment review, nikon 40mm f/2.8 micro-nikkor

September 6, 2011

Review: Sigma 150mm f/2.8 OS

Specs and Purchasing Info: (Nikon) (Canon) (Sony) (Pentax) (Sigma)

During the season, I shoot essentially constantly — I’m in the middle of a stretch of 21 days with shoots on 20 of them, sometimes more than one a day. This means it’s worth it to me to use absolutely the best equipment for my needs, whatever the price — and so it’s telling that my bag has Sigma lenses strewn in among the Nikkors. Gone are the days where third-party lenses are just cheaper, less sturdy versions of existing lenses. Now these makers, Sigma especially, have a knack for filling the sort of niches you might not have realized you needed. Only Sigma lets me shoot at 12mm on full frame. Want a lens that goes from 50-500mm? Sigma. A standard f/1.4 lens for APS-C cameras? Sigma. In my experience, they are less sturdy than professional Nikkors, and I’ve sent plenty to the repair shop, but it’s worth it to open up new ways of seeing.

The Sigma 150mm OS Macro is subtle in its uniqueness. There’s nothing unique about a true, 1:1 macro lens, and there’s nothing unique about an f/2.8 telephoto lens. But when you put them together? Impressive. Generally true macro lenses tend to be about one stop slower than equivalent non-macro lenses, such as Nikon’s 105mm f/2.8 macro versus their 105mm f/2 non-macro. But f/2.8 is a perfectly respectable aperture for a 150mm lens — any faster and you’re getting into super-expensive exotic lens territory. Throw in Optical Stabilization and you have a lens that, on paper at least, would be tempting even for photographers who never shoot macro, especially for photographers who occasionally want telephoto reach but don’t want the weight or expense of a 70-200mm VR.

Does it live up to its role? In all important ways yes, but given the strengths of the alternative choices, the full user report should be helpful in deciding what the right choice is for you.

Optical performance:

It is almost safe to assume that any true macro lens is going to be sharp. There are just a few notable exceptions, but these lenses are designed for resolution, and the Sigma 150mm is no exception. It doesn’t have the shocking almost-too-sharp-for-general-use quality of, say, the Sigma 70mm macro but wide-open it’s more than good enough for rock n’ roll, and stopped down just a few notches it easily out resolves my D3s sensor. I used this lens all for work, not safe shots of brick walls, so the image below was taken in a mahogany room at a quite-unsafe 4000 ISO, but it still gives you an idea of the crispness and color transmission of this lens.

Bokeh

If you are taking close-up pictures at 150mm and f/2.8, you’re going to have a lot more out-of-focus than in-focus, so the quality of those areas (“bokeh”) might matter quite a bit. What I’ve found in general is that the background bokeh is quite pleasing but the foreground areas can be somewhat busy, especially if there are multiple areas that overlap each other. All of my sample photos will have out-of-focus areas to look over, but here are specific examples:

Background bokeh:

Foreground and background, with lots of overlap (worst-case scenario)

Keep in mind that a photo can have choppy bokeh and still be aesthetically pleasing, which I think is the case in the second photo, but it’s handy to be aware of as you make compositions.

Overall usage:

This is a great lens to have in your bag. My biggest worry before I used it was that many macro lenses either don’t focus very quickly or have trouble locking focus, even with a focus-limiter switch, because of the huge focus range they have to be optimized for. Happily, though, the Sigma performs admirably. It has a focus-limiter switch that can limit the range to either just-macro or no-macro for general use, but I only had to use it in the worst lighting conditions. It even worked well when a care-free bride decided to start running straight at the camera:

Because of its specs, this lens seems to have two different specializations: Macro usage and general telephoto performance. For me, the macro usage was mixed in terms of its usefulness. The lens performs admirably, and a true 1:1 macro is very handy when I have to do tiny-detail work such as capturing the inscription on the inside of a ring. But the feel of using a macro lens can change dramatically with focal length. Longer macro lenses have a longer working distance, which is very handy when you’re photographing insects, who would be spooked if you were one inch away from them with a shorter lens, or when you’re using complicated lighting set-up and need to get out of the way of your own shadow. But I tend to photograph objects like rings, and there the shallower depth-of-field usually works against me. The ring in the picture below would seem slightly sharper if shot with a 60mm at the same aperture (f/5.6), because the plane of focus would run through the whole diamond. Generally, it’s a good idea to break out the tripod when doing long-macro work, which I often don’t have time for:

(You can see how insanely narrow the DoF is by looking at the line of texture beneath the ring)

For general use, this is a great option for people who want the reach of a 70-200 without the weight or cost. Given the focus breathing issue of Nikon’s 70-200, at closer distances the Sigma 150 has at least as much reach as the zoom at 200mm! The Sigma comes with two hoods — one for FX users and a narrower one for DX users, but both are a little bit intimidating, taking away a bit of the relative size advantage versus the 70-200:

The only other issue is that while it’s significantly lighter than the 70-200, it’s not a light lens. Sigma unfortunately was unable to add optical stabilization without significantly increasing the weight. The new 150mm is 1150g, or 75 percent as much weight as the 70-200 VRII. But the old, OS-free 150mm was only 895g, or 58 percent the weight of the 70-200! For people like me who try to travel as light as possible, it’s a bit of a shame.

Also, general users should note that all macro lenses transmit less light as they reach close-focusing distances, and modern macro lenses report this to the camera as a smaller f-stop. The Sigma 150 will often give a light-transmission-rating of f/3 instead of f/2.8 even at normal portrait distances.

Buying recommendations:

If you want a lens that can photograph little critters and also function as a general telephoto lens in all sorts of light, this is probably the lens for you. If you don’t care about the macro functions, then you are likely finding yourself choosing between this and a 70-200. This lens is much cheaper than the Nikon or Canon versions, but only $300 cheaper than the Sigma 70-200 OS, so it comes down to personal preference. Even though I love primes, I’ve found that in that range a zoom is really handy to have, because zooming with your feet at 150mm might mean walking back or forth 10 feet to get the right composition.

In some ways the heaviest competition for this lens would be the OS-free version, which might be a better companion to a 70-200 VR, as backup and for times when weight really matters, while this is the better 70-200 replacement. But it seems that Sigma is making the choice for you by discontinuing the old model. Luckily the new one is a great performer.

Sample photos:

Tags: equipment, equipment review, sigma, sigma 150mm, sigma lenses

August 16, 2011

Equipment isn’t Everything (It’s the Vision Thing)

You hang around photographers enough, and you hear the same debates and tropes and ideas pop up over and over again. Probably the most common is a variation of “It’s the photographer, not the equipment.” But of course, it’s the photographers who are saying this. If you asked a camera, they’d probably say something different. A modern version of Aesop’s Lion and the Statue.

Of course, it all comes down to “that vision thing.” A good photographer out to be able to take decent images with just about anything, because the basic technical rules of photography and composition don’t change. I took plenty of photos I like on vacation yesterday with Wendy’s pocket-sized Powershot. But what an experienced photographer does when they pick up a piece of equipment is say “How does this see? What are the range of things I can do with it?” When I pick up a pocket camera, I know that shallow depth-of-field is out and I have to be tricky if I want it to expose the way that I want. When I grab my D3s, I know that pretty much anything my eye can see can be fairly easily photographed, but also that I have to change my attitude if I don’t want to intimidate people with it. In fact, one of the great joys of interchangeable-lens cameras is that changing a lens feels like putting on a new set of eyes. When I put on a fast 85mm, I’m seeing the world in narrow pockets, looking for backgrounds that will look good when out-of-focus. When I throw on a 35mm, I see through those eyes, etc.

I tend to prefer certain sorts of eyes. Light-sensitive, not extremely wide and not extremely telephoto … so I decided to mix it up. The Sigma 12-24mm is wacky wide and, as essentially an f/5.6 lens, extra-slow. But it was a great set of eyes for Esteban and his groomsmen and their socks.

August 2, 2011

Cleaning House

I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time…

I like to keep my work evolving, which means I go through a lot of equipment, and I leave a lot more in my wake behind me. This doesn’t work so well when you live in Manhattan, so I’m doing a summer house-cleaning sale on some equipment I have lying around. I want to be done with this and ship everything before I go to California next week, so even though the pieces retail for as much as $2,000, I’m putting them all on eBay starting at 99 cents, no reserve.

This is what’s called faith in the system.

I still have a few things I was on the fence about, but here’s what’s on the chopping block. Everything is described as honestly as I could in the listing:

Panasonic LX3

Nikon 35mm f/1.8G

Nikon 135mm f/2D DC

Lensbaby Control Freak

and … last but not least…

my Version 1 Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8.
Killing my children, but onward and upward….

July 21, 2011

Review: Nikon 50mm f/1.8G

Specs and pricing info (buy here)

OK, coming off the heels of a review of the $6,000 200mm f/2, I figured it was time to look at something a little more practical, a little lighter, a little cheaper, and so…

The lens on the right, next to the 200mm behemoth, is Nikon’s new 50mm f/1.8G, the latest iteration to the moderately fast normal lens, perhaps the most popular class of lens of all time because it’s versatile, light, and inexpensive. Even with modern-day coatings and modern-day pricing, this lens stands at just over $200. In other words, you could buy almost 27 of these for the cost of the 200mm.

When Nikon took the screw-drive autofocus motor out of entry-level bodies like the D5100, lots of people rightfully complained about losing AF in their old lenses. But one of the happy effects of this is that Nikon has been forced to update the designs of their cheaper lenses, and make new ones like the popular 35mm f/1.8. And so the old “nifty fifty” gets a makeover with new coatings and a new optical formula including an aspherical lens element to cut down on aberrations (especially at the corners of an image).

Can a new lens this cheap be any good? Happily, the answer is yes.

The first thing I noted when I put the lens on is that the autofocus is nice and zippy, faster even than my expensive 35mm and 24mm f/1.4 lenses. This is important because the most popular complaint about the “big brother” 50mm f/1.4G is that the AF is too slow for some uses. With that, and a price tag half that of the f/1.4, it’s a tempting option if you don’t need the widest apertures.

How are the optics?

Very good, with a great price/performance ratio. Wide-open it’s already sharp — not perfectly sharp, but more than sharp enough — as this shot at f/1.8 shows:

100 percent crop:

In terms of out-of-focus rendering, I tend to give 50mm lenses a low bar, since the old, cheap optical design often lends to very choppy bokeh. The 50mm clears the low bar — it’s still a bit busy, perhaps not as smooth as the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 or as most fast telephoto primes, but it tends to look pleasant and not-distracting in real-world pictures. You can click on the two flower snapshots below for full-resolution samples at f/1.8 and f/8:

Here’s a shot that shows off the bokeh characteristics well:

Flare resistance is also really good, likely due to coatings and the tiny front element. Here is a heavily backlit scene as it appears out-of-camera:

For reference, here’s an out-of-camera photo from the same spot with the older 135mm f/2 D DC

Who should buy this lens?

I think this lens should be in a big percentage of modern photographers’ bags, simply because it’s cheap and incredibly light, and is guaranteed to autofocus with any current or upcoming Nikon camera. If you’re big into old manual film cameras, this isn’t the lens for you, but you can find plenty of manual-focus 50mm lenses that are virtually free on eBay. For amateurs on a budget, this is a great addition to a couple kit-zooms so you can trade off versatility for depth-of-field control and a big boost in low light, and you can stick it in a small camera bag without even knowing it’s there. With a small DX camera you have a decent half-torso portrait lens, and even with expensive pro line-ups it’s great to have a light, cheap normal lens you can toss in the bag as a back-up.

Even though the 200mm f/2 is just about perfect in every way on paper, this is the lens I want to keep around. It just works, it gets out of my way, and for my work I actually like most of the photos I get from it more. Buy it here.

Sample photos:

Tags: lens review, nikon

July 18, 2011

Review: 200mm f/2 VR II (director’s cut)

If you have $6000 lying around, purchase the lens here

My review of the exotic, awesome, Nikon 200mm f/2 VRII is up at B&H’s Web site! Thank you so much, guys, for letting me use this fantastic tool. (My next review will be of something much more affordable, I promise).

As someone who’s extensively used both of Nikon’s 70-200s and has experience with the older model 200mm f/2, I had a fair bit of perspective on this lens, so check out the review. But here I have a bit more room for big sample images, so consider this the “director’s cut” of sample photos:

30-image “Brenizer method” panorama

The Amazing Wendy…

Sneak peek at the next wedding on the blog…

45-image Brenizer-method panorama.

Tags: equipment review, nikon

June 23, 2011

Review: LitePad HO+

Specs and Ordering Info:
Daylight Balanced
Tungsten Balanced

On its face, the LitePad HO+ looks as simple as a photographic device could possibly be. Essentially, it looks like a ceiling tile that lights up:

And in practice, that’s what it is — and it’s brilliant. The team at B&H was giving me a tour of all of the changes they’ve been making to the store when I saw these hanging on a wall, and I said “What is that? Can I review THAT?” Simplicity intrigues me — maybe I’m simple-minded.

Actually, though, there are some really clever things going on under this one-centimeter-thick hood. You see, a light like the LitePanel MicroPro consists of a bunch of LED lights aimed directly forward. This is power-efficient, but so far designs that require so many LED lights are really expensive — the 1′-by-1′ variant is currently $1,795. What the LitePad does is have a row of LED lights around the edges aimed inward, and the design of the interior reflects that light outward. I’d expect the middle of the LitePad to be significantly darker than the edges, but the Rosco engineers seem to have figured that out well, and it provides a nice, even output. The LitePad still isn’t cheap at all, but a 1′ square model will run you less than a third of the LitePanel. So for just a bit more than the popular MicroPro, you can have a much larger light source, which makes for softer, generally more flattering light. Here is the MicroPro lying on the LitePad for comparison:

However, there is a cost to the savings — power. Here’s what happens when you turn them on (the LitePanel model I used is tungsten-balanced):

Given that LED lights are already much less powerful than even small strobes, this means effective usage will be limited to spaces with dim ambient light such as indoors or after sunset.

But, to my mind, sometimes dim lighting is exactly what I need, and the dimmer the better, which leads to the second annoyingly quirky thing about the LitePad — it doesn’t ship with a dimmer, and the seperately sold dimmer switch is more than $100.

Quirky, limited usage, simplistic — I immediately fell in love with it. In fact, I didn’t want to review it because I didn’t want other photographers to use it. My job is to work very quickly to make people look good, and broad light sources tend to do that much better. Furthermore, the design makes it incredibly portable — the 1′-square model easily slides in my camera bag’s laptop pocket, and given the extreme thinness I could fit in three more if I wanted. This is for the base model without a tripod mount, though — the mountable Rosco Axiom is necessarily thicker.

What are the effects of the larger light source in practice? My long-suffering girlfriend Wendy was willing to help show this off. Here she is lit at arm’s length by the LitePanel Micropro:

And here she is lit by the LitePad from the same position (white balance adjusted):

Really a huge difference, and much faster to just pull this out of a laptop pocket than to set up a continuous light into a softbox. I love it. I may come back to these as a sort of secret weapon, or even buy an expensive set for times when I want to turn it to 11 and really set up cinema-style lighting.

But the more I thought about, the more I want to look at some other alternatives first, because there are a few things that make this rough around the edges:

The parts are delicate. The LitePad itself is very sturdy given its thinness, but the connector wiggles somewhat worryingly, and the accessories are very fragile, especially the AA battery-holder.
I know that in video world these things are different, but to me as a photographer, “tungsten” means green-free orangey light, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2850K. With included gels, I can get the MicroPro down to a super-warm 2500K. The LitePanel, though, is very hard to gel, so you’re going to take what you can get — and in the tungsten model, that is a pretty greenish 3800K. In other words, to my mind, florescent, not tungsten. This is apparently a problem with a lot of current video lights, as I have seen videographer after videographer spilling unflattering puke-green lights onto my clients as they film.
It’s much cheaper than a 1′ LitePanel, but at $600+ with the dimmer it’s expensive enough that I want to have more confidence in the build quality, as I am VERY hard on my gear. I already had one AA battery-holder come apart in my hands (though at least those ARE inexpensive).
So I’ve reached a paradox where I loved this so much I didn’t want to tell any of you, but I will be sending it back for the time being. There’s a lot happening on the continuous lighting front, and I want to make sure I know exactly what’s right for me. This could well be it, as it has the blessings of a soft light source that I can create VERY quickly, but some experimentation is in order.

In the meantime, here are some samples with it from the field:

It’s a GREAT light for details.

Its flat, even light even makes it the perfect thing to shoot macro on TOP of for uplighting, using other lights for balance:

But really what it’s great at is a quick, flattering light for people:

(this last is a composite, with the light in the frame of the originals about a foot away from each. There it is strong enough for a bit of fill even in shade).

It’s going to hurt me to give this one back, and I may buy another copy soon, but first I will experiment with the cost-benefit ratios of similar products.

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Tags: equipment review, litepad, rosco, rosco litepad ho+

May 17, 2011

Nikon Tilt-Shift Part 2: Comparing the 24mm, 45mm, and 85mm

Specs and Purchasing Info:
Nikon 24mm f/3.5
Nikon 45mm f/2.8
Nikon 85mm f/2.8

I had a lot to say about the philosophical underpinnings of using tilt-shift and selective focus in Part 1 of this review, but now let’s get down to brass tacks: Are these lenses any good, and if so, which ones are worth buying for which photographers?

These are very specialized and fairly expensive lenses, so the answers are going to depend a lot on your intended usage. I wrote a lot about the merits and pitfalls of using these lenses for selective focus partially because it’s what is more applicable to my field, but mostly because if you are primarily interested in the shifting capability of these lenses to combat perspective distortion, then the decision is pretty much a no-brainer — unless you’re looking at buying grey-market Russian lenses or some of the old Nikon PC lenses, this is the only game in town. And, since the widest of these older lenses that I know about is 35mm, if you shoot architecture in tight spaces or particularly shoot a lot of interiors, real-estate photography, etc. I apologize to your wallet but the Nikon 24mm is going to be invaluable.

Here is a sample of the 24mm doing its job inside a church. Generally shooting from such a low angle you would get perspective distortion, especially with the sides of the pews. If you just want to make these sorts of corrections occasionally programs such as Lightroom 3 can approximate it in post, but you need to shoot really loose compositions as you will lose the edges of the frame after correction.

The shifting function has a far more dramatic effect on the wider focal lengths, since telephoto lenses don’t deal too much with perspective distortion in the first place. But the longer lenses like the 85mm see more dramatic effects from focal plane tilting, due to their shallower depth-of-field. So which ones are right for you?

These lenses were designed concurrently and released close to one another, so other than the focal lengths they are very similar in form and function. It makes sense, then, to discuss the three together first before talking of the relative strengths of each:

Nikon tilt-shifts: The good, the bad, and the missed opportunity

Good:

Optical performance: Overall, these lenses have stellar image quality. In addition to the latest Nikon enhancements like ED glass and nano-crystal coating, all of these lenses are overdesigned for the 35mm format — the image circle that they cast is much larger than is needed for any given photo, which allows you to perform a lot of camera movement without severe vignetting. You still get vignetting when you shoot wide-open with these lenses at their most extreme settings, but much, much less than you do when freelensing with a normal Nikon lens, for example. This also means that wide-open shooting when not tilted or shifted will have virtually no vignetting. They are extremely sharp right from their widest apertures (though, of course, these apertures are not nearly as fast as the non-tilt-shift prime lenses of similar focal lengths). Like most recent Nikon professional lenses, these also have excellent color transmission and flare resistance, as this shot with the 85mm shows:

If you’re doing precision work and trying to squeeze resolution out of a megapixel monster like the D3X, these lenses can be really useful even shot normally.

Macro capability: One nice touch these lenses have that most tilt-shifts don’t is that they all function as 1:2 Macro lenses. For really tiny macro work like reading the inscriptions on the inside of a ring I still prefer a 1:1 macro like the Nikon 60mm AF-S, but for most purposes they can supplant the need for a macro in your bag, which helps justify their cost. You can get especially interesting compositions from a 24mm macro, though the extremely close working distance means you need to be careful not to get in your own light:

Macro with the 85mm:

In fact, this is where these lenses functions have a nice synchronicity — in macro work, you constantly struggle to get enough depth-of-field, so having the ability to put the focal plane where you want it is invaluable. In this shot with the 45mm, I didn’t want to have to stop down to f/22 to get the words in focus, and thanks to the tilt I didn’t have to:

Build quality: All three of these have a generally solid feel, with good locking mechanisms for each of their tilt and shift functions. If you’re new to these lenses, the layout of all the knobs and switches has a much higher learning curve than any other lens, but I never ran into problems with things sliding out of place for general use.

Electronic controls: Although these lenses are necessarily manual focus, they are designed to be fully recognized by Nikon DSLRs. They have a large, precise aperture ring, but they can also be used in Program and Shutter-priority modes. I admit I never had any reason to use them in those modes, but it’s nice to know that they’re there.

The bad:

Tilt and shift are not independent of each other. One of the nice things about this lens is that you can rotate the entire thing on your camera, so that you can tilt or shift left and right or up and down. But the problem is that the relation to each other is locked in. By default the mechanisms are perpendicular — so if you’re shifting up and down you can only tilt left and right. You can send them to the Nikon service center to make them run parallel, but that’s not a great option in the field. So if you’re doing a lot of specialized usage in the field that uses tilting and shifting willy-nilly, you might be better served in the Canon world, where both the 24mm TS-E II and the 17mm TS-E have independent operation (though not macro focusing).

Which lens is right for me?

The only major difference between these lenses is the focal length. But given the price point, most of you are only going to buy one, if any, so it’s important to consider which one you want to be saddled with.

Traditionally, the wideness of the 24mm lends itself best to architecture and interior photography. Its shifting creates really dramatic proportion effects, but it’s too wide to create much of a “miniature effect” or dramatic selective focus with its tilting. For my sort of work, I found this lens to be the least useful, although I did get some images I liked from it:

The 45mm splits the difference, and seems to be the lens of choice for wedding photographers looking to dabble in the tilt-shift world. And for good reason — if you’re just going to have one, this is wide enough to get a bit of context for things like dress shots or photojournalism, but long enough to use for environmental portraiture and to get dramatic tilting effects. For these sorts of users the 45mm will probably be the most versatile lens:

In fact, I was expecting the 45mm to be a slam-dunk for my usage, so I was surprised at how much I liked the 85mm. The longer focal length makes it more suitable for close portraiture, and the tilt effect can be as dramatic or subtle as you want it to be. With the focal plane control paired with the macro functionality, this lens is also a great choice for product or food photographers who don’t want to use medium-format systems.

May 10, 2011

Fuji X100 review

In-camera “motion panorama” taken with the X100

Specs and Purchasing Info

The Fuji X100 has been hotly anticipated for a very long time — in fact, long before it was announced, designed, or conceived. In the film days there were countless great little cameras that paired sharp, fast lenses with nice operation … the Konica Hexar, the Olympus Pen, and on and on and on… Until recently, though, this space was widely underserved by digital camera makers, whose small cameras were either saddled with tiny sensors, giving them high noise, poor dynamic range, and no depth-of-field control, or were just smaller versions of the big, professional DSLRs, which when paired with a good lens made them not truly small at all.

Most of the market was pretty well-served — just want to take snapshots? Buy a pocket camera or use your phone. Want a versatile tool that can create great images in any situation? Go for a professional DSLR with the right lenses and lighting. But a lot of people were left scratching their heads. Why can’t we have a small camera that’s truly great in low-light? How can we recreate the fun and quality of these old film cameras? And then there were a lot of people like me — I own literally the best possible photographic equipment for my purposes. I spend a staggering amount of my waking hours doing or thinking about photography. But my cameras and lenses are heavy, conspicuous, and cumbersome, so if I’m not on the job, I walk around without a camera at all. That’s just … wrong.

Recently camera makers have tried different forays into this space, whether it’s the micro-Four-Thirds cameras of Olympus and Panasonic, Sigma’s DP2, or Leica’s X1 I tried the X1 both before and after the recent firmware upgrade, and the new firmware makes it a nice, but overpriced camera that would be a nice option in a world where the X100 didn’t exist.

But now it does, and I’ve been shooting with it constantly for the past week. I was going to do an extensive comparison to the X1, but this is, as they say, a curb-stomp. The X100 has a lens that is twice as fast as the X1, it has better operations in most aspects (although the X1′s firmware upgrade does make it’s manual-focus more usable than the X100′s), and its vintage aesthetics are, in my opinion, much nicer. I’ve already had people come up to me and jokingly tell me they wanted to steal the X100 from me even though they had no idea what camera it was, and even when I was also carrying a Nikon D3s. All that and it’s cheaper than the X1 (although not cheap, itself). The comparison is done. You can tell Fuji was gunning for the X1 just by the name of the X100, and they succeeded. Unless you have some very specialized needs or are a red-dot fetishist, I can’t imagine someone buying an X1 at market rate now.

So let’s get to the camera itself. I had very high expectations for this camera. Did it live up to them?

You bet it did.

The first thing you will note about using the X100 is that it’s fun right from the start. The innovative hybrid viewfinder alone will make you want to run around and take pictures with your eye glued to it. You know a camera is fun when it wants to make you take photographs even if you know the composition is garbage, just because the act of taking a photo gives you enjoyment. That’s how we all start when we pick up our first camera, but we lose that joy somewhere along the way as we start drilling down to improve our portfolio or do “serious work” with our cameras. Well, for the first night I immediately started terrorizing my cats, loving that the near-total silence of the camera could let me get right in their faces without fazing them. (The X100 has a special “silent mode” that puts the camera in maximal ninja mode with no sound or flash, but you can turn the shutter sound off in normal modes, too.

But is it suitable for professional work? It can be. Compared to a Nikon D3s with a 35mm f/1.4 lens it has much less depth-of-field control and not as insane low-light performance, but the fact that I used it as part of my arsenal for engagement shoots and a wedding this weekend speaks volumes. I will never sacrifice the quality of my client work for a review, and even though I had the Leica X1 for two weddings I wasn’t comfortable enough with it for it to ever come out of my bag. But at this weekend’s wedding, I shot hundreds of photos with the X100, and would have taken more if it didn’t run out of batteries.

Clearly I like this camera. So let’s start with what I don’t like, given that it’s a shorter list.

The bad:

The price: Compared to the $9,000 you’d drop for a Leica M9 with a 35mm f/2 lens, this camera seems like a steal. But it was expensive to start out with and scarcity has made it even more expensive. But the only other camera in its class right now is $2,000. Competition of later models will hopefully bring the price down in years to come, now that makers have seen how much people are hungering for this sort of camera. And honestly, when compared to the competition, the price probably belongs in the “good” section, especially when it comes back down to where it should be. But now that makers see that this isn’t just a tiny niche market, it should eventually come down more.
Some of the function placement, particularly ISO. You can map ISO to your function button, but that robs you of a function button, and to turn auto-ISO on and off you have to go menu-diving into the third page of the setup menu. Some sort of Nikon-like “favorite menu items” list is sorely needed in a firmware update.
Macro is soft wide open The X100 has a great macro functionality, but it opens itself to sometimes massive veiling flare when shot at f/2. Here’s a macro shot at f/2 and f/4 to show the difference. I selected a slightly backfocused f/2 shot because it creates a worst-case scenario (so usually it’s not this bad, but it’s noticeable). At distance, f/2 is plenty sharp.
f/2:

f/4:
F/2 in general has some funny properties You get the feeling that they had to make some sacrifices to get a lens this small to open this wide. Auto-functions will maximize a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second when using f/2, which can limit your outdoor usage (they have a nice built-in ND filter feature for it, but again you have to menu-dive for it). But you can use shutter speeds of 1/4000th or higher just fine if you manually select them.
The long throw of manual focus makes it almost useless Want to set your manual-focus, especially in macro? You have to turn and turn and turn until whatever you wanted to take a photo of is long gone. The X1 had this issue, and it was nicely fixed by a firmware upgrade, so I’m hoping Fuji can do the same.
The lens cap. I already lost mine. Rolled into a sewer grate. Just bought an old Leica cap and hood that can be more easily attached.

This camera is a bit quirky, so there may be a lot of other things that make you bag your head at first or until you carefully go through the manual — which I’m not used to, since all DSLRs pretty much work the same way — but in less than a week I’ve figured out pretty much everything else except these things.

Now…

The Good

Aesthetics. Does it matter whether or not a camera is good-looking? Well, it doesn’t hurt. The entire nature of this sort of camera has a bit of a retro feel to it from the “f/8 and be there” days of photojournalism and street photography, and the form matches the function gorgeously.
The viewfinder. Brilliant, and perhaps the main advantage over similar-sized systems like the Sony NEX-5 or the downtrodden X1 again. I haven’t imagined anything Nikon could make me want to upgrade my D3s to a new camera for, but a professional version of this hybrid viewfinder might do it. Sometimes an electronic viewfinder has advantages, as it can show you *exactly* the photo you’re going to get, even if you’re exposing much above or below real-life lighting, or using shallow depth-of-field. If the EVF had “retina resolution,” that alone could tempt me to buy a D4. As it is, the X100′s EVF is pretty good, and I find myself using it more than the optical finder.
Unobtrustiveness. I’ve learned to be pretty unobtrusive even with a big camera clicking away. But having a little camera that makes virtually no noise at all brings it to an entirely different level. I would *never* get this close to a singer performing at a wedding ceremony with a shutter-snapping camera:

And it was great for little moments during wedding prep when people would get into the rhythm of not even knowing when I was or wasn’t taking a picture, and be themselves:
Responsiveness. No, unlike the D3s or professional DSLRs you can’t just mash the shutter away and know that a picture would be taken ever time, no matter what. If you’re shooting RAW+fine JPEG it will take a second or so to write to the card. But the shutter lag is small enough that you can definitely do photojournalism with this as long as you have a good sense of timing:
Image quality. This is the best low-light sensor I’ve used in any APS-C camera (though I haven’t used recent ones like the D7000 Pentax K-5, etc.) This makes it the best low-light sensor in any current Fuji camera. Though it doesn’t have the dynamic range tricks of the Fuji S5 Pro, dynamic range is good, and it has some built-in dynamic range options that push and pull the JPEGs to maximize it. (Warning — if you use these DR options and then process the RAW files in third-party programs, you will tend toward underexposure). It also has that great Fuji color. Fuji has always had great out-of-camera JPEGs, and I still extract the built-in JPEGS because sometimes they’re better than what I can get with processing. Here’s an image first as the in-camera JPEG and then as the RAW file processed with Aperture (which you can do if you convert it to a DNG). Clicking on either of these will download the full-resolution image. The RAW file is sharper, but the colors of the original are at least as good, with warmer shadows:
Original:

Processed RAW file:

The colors are vibrant, the pictures are sharp, and noise is low. Here’s an ISO 3200 image in tricky light:

100 percent crop:

The autofocus belongs in both categories, but mostly in “good.” It hunts a lot in macro mode, but that’s to be expected. In good or decent light it is zippy and accurate. In really low-light, though … that’s where the phase detection AF system of a good DSLR comes into its own.

Recommendation:
I kind of see the X100 as being like the iPad, a fantastic accessory to a main system. Most people who are just looking for their main camera will be better served by something cheaper or by something more versatile. But for people who love that street photography and 1960s photojournalism aesthetic or, like me, have funds, have big, heavy primary cameras and can’t stand the thought of walking around all day without a way to capture the world around you with more response and quality than your cell phone can, this is a great camera for you. You will probably never see me in public again without it*

*Which means I will probably lose it quickly, since I’m used to five pound cameras, but I like it enough that I’ll buy another one.

Some more pictures from the X100.

The small size and weight made getting the right angle in a tight cab a lot easier.

Out-of-camera JPEG:

Unobtrusiveness allowed me to shoot a couple in the Apple Store unmolested. As soon as I pulled out the D3s the clerks got uneasy:

Out-of-camera JPEG. Clicking will download full-res version.

Tags: equipment review, fuji x100, fuji x100 review, x100 review

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