F300EXR – Revier Part 14 – A walk in the woods with the new camera …

As mentioned in Part 13, I exchanged my camera yesterday for one with a better lens. Although this one is still not perfect, I have found that the corners are quite acceptable now at 24mm. A slight blur top left, but otherwise pretty good. And the blur top left is not dramatic the way the blur top right was on the previous cam.

So I took it for a brief walk in the woods today to see if the corners are acceptable in practical use … and landscape in the woods is a pretty common usage pattern for a compact. I shot this lovely path at at 24mm and then at 31mm … both look good to me. A bit of processing for exposure and tone, but none for sharpening (except output sharpening after downsizing.) You can follow the leaves right into the corners at the bottom … and the corner bottom left is currently the worst one on the cam.

A little way up, I found a scene that looked kind of nice, so I set the tripod to record two images, one at f/4.4 and one at f/13. This will reveal two things … that the corners improve slightly with the extra aperture, and that the middle softens slightly … this is either from slight tripod shake (although that would have affected the corner crop too) or it is diffraction beginning to set in (my guess.)

Now let’s see them without the crops obscuring the show …

f/4.4

f/13

Both are perfectly acceptable …

By the way … the light was very soft here so I switched to Velvia for the last two. I shoot Velvia for the rest of the series, except where I compare them near the end.

Here is a spectacular bit of fungus … the colors are amazing … so much so that I had to juice them even further.

And a lovely maple leaf (Oh Canada!) hanging in the breeze … shot at the full 360mm … makes for some very decent looking backgrounds …

The following image is a blend of two images. At 360mm from a close distance (4 feet above on tripod), the leaf un the upper left quadrant cannot be in focus at the same time as the log and ground. I happened to shoot it both ways and did not like either version … but painting the leaves in over top fixed the problem perfectly.

Another great looking bit of fungus. The colors again are spiked because the image looks so nice when they are drawn out.

If you clicked through, you probably noticed how sharp and detailed this image is. It’s pretty impressive. So here is an 800x800 crop from the middle … you will need to click on it to see it pixel for pixel … and no one can deny the inherent sharpness of this lens.

I thought I’d revert back to Provia to improve the captures … I am not a big fan of black shadows. This was a good opportunity to show the difference with nothing else changed.

You will definitely want to click through on that one …

And one last image … a tree with a small plant growing in its bark. Weird. The tree almost looks burnt and the background looks pretty smooth, despite being a tad busy …

My verdict so far is that I am pleased with this copy of the F300EXR.