On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

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

I’ve been very happy using Apple’s Aperture as my image repository. I have a library of 178 GB on a 500 GB disk. I have a slower, but size matched 500 GB Vault disk. There are some other data archives taking up room on the disks, but these are designated for images and should provide capacity through next year.

I’m on my third Time Machine drive for backing up everything else. I love the idea, but it really does use up disk space at a frightening pace. My third 500 GB drive won’t hold more that a week’s worth of backup, so today I’ve added a 1TB drive for Time Machine. It’s odd to me that Time Machine lets you switch disks easily, but doesn’t move the archive to the new disk. So I’m faced with wiping the old archive or putting the drive aside. Since the archive only goes back a week, I’ll probably just wipe it and depend on the new 1TB drive.

Also added to the arsenal today is a firewire Compact Flash reader for getting D300 images off the cards more quickly. Connecting the camera by cable is slow and uses up the batteries. A valuable little gadget.

The big remaining issue is storing and processing my D300 RAW files. Aperture can’t read them, so I’ve been keeping them out of Aperture. I’m using Capture NX exclusively for conversion and like the results so much that I think it will become a permanent part of the workflow.

At this point I expect Apple to provide support pretty soon, so I’ll live without the Aperture support. Once I can use Aperture for asset management again, I’ll probably go back to exporting the RAWs of high rated images to a folder for RAW conversion by Capture NX. After saving as a TIFF with the same file name, I can drag the images back into the Aperture project for asset management. I’m left with the Capture NX NEF files that have the instructions for the image alterations embedded in them. They don’t render in Aperture and the manupulations don’t survive being brought in and re-exported from Aperture, leaving me with a folder of altered NEFs outside of Aperture.

DSC0116 – D300, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This kind of writing on a “professional” website really bothers me.: Nikon D300 NEF image files – Lightroom 1.3 vs. Capture NX 1.3 – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog.

Expecting some kind of thoughtful analysis, instead I find someone who ran an image or two through two programs with a new camera and found differences in rendering. I expect this sort of writing on the DP Review boards, but not on the O’Reilly digital sites.To be more specific, Capture NX is using the camera settings to render the image as the user intended. ACR (Lightroom) and Aperture don’t, but instead use their own standard recipe. One of the clear advantages in a manufacturer’s product is that it works systematically with camera controls. For example, I can use one set of shooting parameters for events and family images and another set optimized for landscape. I believe it’s necessary to presharpen at the RAW conversion stage to critically evaluate images, so I set that in camera or in the RAW conversion program.To develop craft is is to have intent and control over one’s tools. Evaluate results and use the feedback to refine the process for the desired results. Pushing buttons and seeing what you get can only lead to happy accident

One of my favorite lenses on the the D80 has been the 24mm f/2.8D prime. The 36mm equivalent is for me a “normal” view that doesn’t feel wide but doesn’t constrict the view down to the detail level. It focuses pretty closely and has a flat field, making my abstract closeups a possibility with the same lens.

I bought the 12-24mm f/4 DX zoom last spring for my Italy trip to have a truly wide lens since the 24mm had been my widest Nikon lens. I used the zoom a number of times, but somehow I didn’t get along with it’s bulk. On the D80, the primes, 24mm and 50mm balanced well.

In the last few months, I’ve been using the 12-24mm more and become more and more impressed by it’s very sharp, very contrasty drawing of a scene. When I took the D300 out for the first few times, the 12-24mm went on it and produced remarkable images. I find myself at the widest end of the zoom most often, portraying the suburban landscape with a classic landscape photography vocabulary.

At the end of the week I put the 24mm on the D300 and didn’t feel as much of a change in bulk as with the D80. I got a few nice images though. The wider aperture gives a different look as in this image, where the foreground grass is de-emphasized because it’s not in focus. The trees are in critical focus and the background recedes more as it moves out of focus.

As I was working on the image though, I noticed the chromatic aberration in the the thin branches of the central, leafless tree. There’s a color fringe that’s barely visible in a full monitor view (20″ Apple Cinema). Of course this is twice the size that my Epson 800 will print and about as large as I’d ever print the image anyway. I adjusted it in Capture NX using the chromatic aberration control, but it remains visible in the image.

It will be interesting to look back over some of my other images and see to what extent the older prime exhibits this behavior. It’s very easy in Aperture to filter images by lens and camera, so I can quickly have a look. But more importantly, I’d like to know whether I should pursuing the look of the 24 or switch to the 12-24mm for these wider angle captures.

The combination of the D300 and Capture NX is certainly an inspiration to take more photographs. This image was captured with the 24mm prime which performs very well on the D300. I also added a Domke strap to the camera, the same type that I have on the D80.

So far, I’m not tempted to carry the D80 for it’s lighter weight, but it may be my excitement about the D300 that has relegated the D80 to backup. The images I’m getting from the D300 are way better than anything I’ve seen from the Olympus E-3, which was the alternative choice, so I’m very happy about my Nikon commitment.

The FL-50 Olympus flash is sold on eBay and by Sunday the E-1 and the 14-54mm lens will be gone as well.

Today I turned on Active D-Lighting for the first time and am adjusting to it’s effects. It alters the actual exposure value chosen by the camera, so when you turn it on and off in Capture NX, it’s just the same as turning on and off D-Lighting. So I think that for Aperture use, it will be more just an exposure shift to preserve highlights.

While the D300 images are remarkable, my workflow is completely broken. While a codec for the Nikon RAW format of the D300 has been released for Windows, Apple has not yet released their system level support for these files.

At this point, I import into Aperture as usual, but then I copy the RAW files into a folder on the hard drive where I can browse them with Capture NX. I registered my trial version with the code that came with the D300, so I have a copy of Capture NX to use.

The control point interface of Capture NX works well with my style of post processing. For example in this image, I darkened the foreground dirt area to bring out the white of the grass in the lower 1/3 of the image. I boosted the saturation of the grass at the top right to help define the upper edge of the picture plane. The control point will work on changing the tonality of all of the green leaves. In Photoshop, I’d be doing a wider dodge and burn type maneuver and altering the tone of all of the area less selectively.

Driving again this morning in New Jersey. I took an exit off the Turnpike and let the GPS tell me when I had used up the slack before my meeting. I stopped at an orchard looking desolate in the early light, but a bit later, noticed this odd scoured landscape in front of a housing development. I pulled the car into a side street, ran up a little embankment and grabbed this one shot.

The rendition of the D300 with Capture NX is just extraordinary in a painterly way. Exposure and focusing with everything on auto was probably better than I would ever have done manually.

Technology is finally in the service of art.