On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

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

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.