On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

I’m really pretty pleased with my decision to commit to the Nikon system last year. The D300 is a great image capture device for me, doing everything I need at this point.

In retrospect, moving up from the D80 to the D300 was a good decision, mostly because I find matrix metering in the D300 to work much better for me than the D80 did. My presumption is that it’s a matter of tuning the system for consumers vs advanced shooters. Using the two cameras with spot metering results in relatively similar images in the end.

What would a D700 do that the D300 doesn’t? Presumably I’d get another stop or stop and a half of sensor speed. But I don’t run into the D300’s limits frequently enough that it would really make a big difference.

There’s the advantage of wide lenses being wide, but I’m fine with the 12-24mm f/4 DX lens providing me with an 18mm equivalent. I’m learning to use my stable of lenses most efficiently- the 24-120mm f3.5-5.6 staying on the camera most frequently, with the 105mm f/2.8 for when I want macro or really sharp images.

This image shows something more- the capture is a first step. The editing and the post processing are so much more central to creating images now. This is another Capture NX2 postprocessing exercise. I set out to make the flags really stand out with local contrast changes. I’m still learning how to best apply curves and u-point adjustments, but it’s easier to achieve in Capture NX2 at this point than in Photoshop.

Why is that I so frequently take the camera out and fear that I will be unable to create a compelling image? You would think that after a while I would know that the odds were pretty good that something would work out.

I wanted to get an image of Baltimore County along one of my cycling routes. I stopped at the end of the day, but approaching storms clouded out the sun and left me without interesting end of day light. But once the sun had gone down, the sky became more interesting being itself lit from within.

This was captured with the D300 and the 12-24mm f/4 DX lens. No tripod. Postprocessing was entirely in Capture NX. There was some noise in the sky, but the noise reduction in NX2 took care of that quite nicely. WIth the U-points, it was easy to keep the smoothing effect of the noise reduction out of the corn stalks where it would otherwise kill the nice sharp detail.

I like the lighting in this. The highlighting of the stalks under the bright sky area doesn’t exist at all in the original capture. It was added using a coloro control point to pull up the highlights which reads very nicely as an eerie lighting of the foreground by the bright sky area. I did it to get the eye to be pulled back into the sky region from the sharp foreground.

This is another in the recent Nikon D300 midrange zoom images I’ve been collecting. What’s significant is that I used it as the subject as I began to explore Capture NX2 in earnest.

With the previous version, I thought that the conversions were clearly the best available for the Nikon NEF files. I used the control point technology for overall tonal balancing. But I’d move to Photoshop (via Aperture roundtripping) for local contrast adjustment with curves and then use of the NIK Efex filters plus selective sharpening and blurring.

In the new NX2 any adjustment can be a control point, including curves and sharpening. So instead of using masks in Photoshop, I can use the more direct U-Points of NX2. I’m lacking the handful of Efex filters I favor, but I could purchase them for NX2. That would put almost all of the editing I do directly into NX2.

One point that’s lacking is the ability to directly round trip with Aperture. Now I export the master NEF into a folder, open in NX2, save as TIFF and then drag back into Aperture. If I choose edit with NX2 in Aperture, Aperture first insists on converting to TIFF itself and sending that to Capture NX. It would take a real integration for Aperture to send a NEF, but then for NX2 to send Aperture back a TIFF.

I’m sure I could automate part of this using Applescript and Automator but getting the file back into the project where it belongs seems a bit tricky.

I feel like I’ve taken a step back in my suburban landscape images. I’m concentrating on capturing smaller objects. It’s the lingering influence of the Alphabet exercise and seeing things through a zoom lens. I’m more actively working to capture the feel of an object rather than responding to a rendered scene before me. It’s easier to do in the summer when the light is less dramatic.

In using my 24-120mm over several days, I find that do have more shots that look “soft”. But most are sharp and plenty contrasty.

Once I started getting this feedback, I began to realize that I’ve been trying to push the lens past its limits. I try hand holding the lens zoomed out to 120mm and using shutter speeds of 1/4 second. It’s amazing how good some of these images actually are.

I also find that many images have shallower depth of field than I expect. I presume that it’s partly due to having been shooting with my 24mm for so long that I forget that at 80mm and f/5.6 the front and side of a tree trunk won’t both be in perfect focus. Moving up close with the 24 mm and it’s floating CRC element gives a different rendering regarding front to back focus.

So I need to be more conservative in what I ask the VR in the lens to do. And I need to gain an intuitive feel for DOF across the 5x zoom of the lens.

In April of this year, I celebrated my 10th year of not actively practicing medicine. It was a great choice for me, given the frustrations I had with the health care system within academia 10 years ago. I can only imagine how much worse it must be now.

Essay – Fed Up With the Frustrations, More Doctors Change Course – NYTimes.com: “%u201CIt will take real structural change in the work environment for physician satisfaction to improve,%u201D Dr. Mark Linzer, an internist at the University of Wisconsin who has done extensive research on physician unhappiness, told me. %u201CFortunately, the data show that physicians are willing to put up with a lot before giving up.%u201D”

I’m glad that I was willing to take a chance on a change in career direction back then.