On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

This was my most successful black and white capture using the Nikon P5000 yesterday. f/5.3 at 1/3 sec with VR at ISO 800.

The compact camera creates yet another style of shooting which I could perhaps call point and shoot. While the camera creates nice exposures when set to an auto mode, it takes just as much consideration to get a really good image as it would with any other camera. With the narrow dynamic range, shooting JPEG there is a big difference between the D300 and this camera. An even bigger difference between this and film, where tolerance for less than perfect exposure is even greater.

There’s no real issue with image quality really. It’s just that it takes more care and less spontaneity is possible with the camera.

At The Online Photographer, Michael Johnston discusses black and white photography books. Like him, the Ansel Adams books were where I learned technique, reading very little else when I started back in the early 80’s. In fact, I don’t remember reading anything else and I have no books in my collection from then other than the Ansel Adams ones.

More recently, George Schaub’s “The B&W Digital Darkroom” proved useful as I began using digital capture to artistic ends. In general, I will forever be indebted to George DeWolfe for “Fine Print Workshop” as it played a role in creating my current style. Vincent Versace’s “Welcome to Oz” is now percolating though, but will take some time to incorporate. I think that all three of these books are in the intermediate to advanced category, going beyond how to why.

Nikon tells me not to use Capture NX with OS X Leopard 10.5. It seems to be working fine for me, so I’m ignoring their advice, working only on copies of the original RAWs out of Aperture.

This is truly amazing for me. Nikon has provided the new D300 picture controls in Capture NX to be applied to any RAW image. Here’s a shot from last spring’s trip to Italy processed through Capture NX set to Vivid. The image is so much more vibrant than what I see in Aperture! The color and sharpness of the D80 are really very, very good. The D300 bests it for me in functionality, metering and Active D-Lighting, but I won’t hesitate to go light and fast with the D80.

Yesterday I was wondering whether the Leica plus C-41 process film was really worth it. I tried to capture some images with the D80, but fell back into my usual patterns. Today I took out my wife’s Nikon P5000 compact camera, but didn’t have enough opportunity to capture any workable images.

In the mean time, National Photo here in Baltimore developed my 2 rolls of C-41 process black and white (one Kodak, one Ilford) and I picked up the CD this afternoon.

And once again it’s clear to me why there’s no substitute for the Leica plus film. This is a Kodak CN400BW image virtually straight from the lab’s CD. I could work on it a bit more, but it has an tonality and feel that I just don’t get from a digital capture. For me, these images capture the urban experience in a very particular way.

Looking through these, I believe that I’ll continue to use this combination for my urban excursions during business travel.

This afternoon I had a few errands to run, so rather then grab my current rig, the D300 with 12-24mm f4 on it, I took the D80 with a 50mm f1.8 instead. Since one of my errands was to drop off rolls of film shot with the Leica M6ttl on my recent San Francisco trip, I thought it would be a worthwhile experiment to see whether the D80 could be an adequate travel camera.

After all, the task I’m giving the Leica is restricted: ISO to 400, only one focal length (generally 35mm) with a maximum aperture of f2.0, and shoot monochrome. Metering is center weighted. All of that is well within the D80’s performance parameters.

Picking up the D80 after using the Leica and the D300, it strikes me as smaller and lighter than I remember it. Compared to the Leica it is boxier, that is to say, deep rather than shallow and wide. Controls are superior to the Leica with the choice of built in spot metering.

One idea would be to use the D80 and a prime or two as a travel camera instead of the Leica. Or perhaps even switch to a small sensor compact camera for travel, possibly given up on the Leica / film approach.

Can the D80 with a fast prime replace the Leica?

Shooting through sunset, I came back with 69 images- about two rolls of film. Four images worthy of some further processing. Even though I went out thinking that I would try to capture “black and white”, this is the only image that works as black and white. With a device that captures color, I was still drawn to color contrasts. Perhaps next time I’ll change the shooting menu to Monochrome so that the previews show up as black and white. It may also just be that when I have an SLR in my hands I fall back into habit and capture my usual images.

This image is nice enough but it also reflect my DSLR style of tightly composing and using out of focus elements. The rangefinder shooting style is different. I pick subject by focusing and have a looser idea of how the image hangs together because I can see through and around the image area itself.

It’s also very clear that the digital sensor responds very differently to light compared to the film scanner combination. I can get to where I want it to be pretty quickly, especially with the powerful control point adjustments in Nikon Capture NX. But I get the sense that I’m trying to reproduce what film would have done.

Perhaps I would have been better starting with film in the first place. Tomorrow I’l find out what last week in San Francisco looked like to the film at the time.

Scott Kelby reviews the Nikon D300. It’s a short review, but hits the high points: color, noise, focusing, AWB all better than we’ve seen before. He says he’s giving up his D2xs as the D300 does everything it did. He neglects to mention how much lighter and compact the D300 is, one reason that I’ll wait for the D3’s technology to trickle down to a D300 size camera.

Scott mentions how useful he finds the live view feature. I’ve played with it a few times, but I’m waiting until I’m out with a tripod to really test it’s usefulness. He doesn’t mention Active D-Lighting, which makes me think that he just hasn’t tried it yet or, being a Photoshop guru, he won’t be using Capture NX which I think is needed to see it’s tremendous advantage.

Happy with the D300, still waiting on the Apple RAW support to get Aperture back in the workflow. In the meantime I continue to refine my Aperture / Capture NX / Photoshop workflow.

I feel like I’m going out on a high note with this image.

Just before I put the Oly kit up for sale on eBay, I shot for a few minutes to make sure everything was working correctly. Maybe I was also taking one last look to make sure I really wanted to part with my first DSLR.

Well, it’s all been sold now and rather than missing the camera, I will look back fondly on the year or two that I shot with it. The images the camera produces are beautiful, if not up to current resolution standards. They match the 6 megapixel resolution that I get from the photo lab scans of my film images, so they seem more film-like than the Nikon images which have a different feel to them.

I decided against the E-3 in the end only because Nikon offered more to me in the D300. I wasn’t impressed by the E-3 images I was seeing, while the D300 images were often quite remarkable. Now that I have the D300, that’s been confirmed for me personally.

In the end, I think Olympus made one critical error at the start of the digital era: their target was 35mm film. They calculated, based on physical constraints, that the 4/3rds format could eventually equal 35mm film resolution and sensitivity. They therefore could create a camera to replace the best 35mm in the digital domain.

Unfortunately, the major manufacturers, Nikon and Canon, with their commitment to legacy technology compromised regarding theoretical constraints. The quality was behind Oly at the time of the E-1, but was good enough. There are now technological fixes for many of those compromises which ironically now has pushed the Nikon and Canon cameras beyond the quality that was achieved by 35mm film. Resolution equals or exceeds 35mm while sensitivity is now much better than film ever was.

This was really clear to me this week as I was shooting with the Leica in San Francisco. It’s winter and SF is hilly, so one starts losing the light early. Soon I had the camera set “wide open” as I think of it, at f2.0 with 1/30th of a second. Because I’m using nominally rated ISO 400 film that really looks better at ISO 320. And I’m think to myself how these ISOs on the D300 are just normal, with ISO 1600 starting to show degradation. I get two more stops of sensitivity with digital now, allowing me to shoot into early evening much more effectively. The film is purely for the look of film plus rangefinder.

An image from my last trip to London. I’ll be traveling to San Francisco shortly and have a bit of a decision to make. I’ve been traveling with the Leica and a few rolls of film on these business trips. It’s creating a nice urban project in black and white where the graphic nature of the city comes to the fore.

But I do love shooting with the D300. I expect I’ll only have have a single afternoon for walking and capturing images and hate to lug the big rig just for that. So I guess I’ll grab some more C-41 process black and white film and head for the coast.

I found just a few moments before sunset to capture a few images of our first snow of the year in Baltimore. The D300’s metering was right on although the snow was rendered very blue by the Auto White Balance.

Oddly, I had trouble with white balance on uploading to Flickr, a problem I’ve never had before. Usually I get a good color match between Aperture and Flickr on the calibrated monitor.

Also oddly, Flickr made Picnik available today for editing photographs for the first time today and I was able to reset the white balance on line to something reasonable. Perhaps something in Flickr has changed, affecting whitebalance or embedded profiles. Snow is clearly a very sensitive subject when it comes to white balance.

Now that Baltimore is covered with a couple of inches of snow, this may be the last image of autumn