Dear 16 Year Old Me

There are many things the average person would probably love to tell themselves or others at 16 …

• Start your retirement savings early, small amounts early become big amounts later
• Share your life with someone with whom you share values
• Spend every free moment with your kids when they are young … you will be surprised at how fast they seek independence at 12 or 13 and the regrets cut deep …
• If you are an asshole, don’t procreate … the world already has its fill
• Get into the habit of regular exercise … you will thank yourself later
• Follow your dreams when choosing a career … do something you love … you have plenty of time to become a wage slave if that is your destiny

And so on …

Now the big one, which is the point of this article: do not play fast and loose with the Sun. Take care when you are young and check your skin later on.

D300 – Forsythia Blooms

I rarely manage to capture my Forsythia in full bloom. But today I was able to get a nice shot from above with the glorious 85mm 1.8D set at f/5.6 for some depth and perfect clarity of the whole bush and all its flowers. Impressive, even if unstructured :-)

F550EXR – JPEG versus RAW versus Pro Low Light — Review Part 49

So here I am at lunch after visiting Henry’s to confirm that there are no Sony HX9Vs to be seen on these shores, and I am pondering the F550EXR in my hands once again. This building is interesting for some shots because I invariably sit all the way on the inside of the building where the only lighting is incandescent, and yet I face the outdoors which has rather blue light by comparison.

And it’s pretty dark, so 1600 ISO or 3200 ISO are needed for decent shutter speeds.

So I shoot the coke and water as my opening bid. A few people down the right side of this section get caught up in the 24mm image, and the camera resolves them pretty well, especially when one considers the very bright windows in behind. I shot this at +1EV in order to pull out detail in the stuff on my table and the face of the girl on the right. The windows were lost anyway, even at DR400.

As far as I am concerned, the new Fuji jpeg engine is pretty amazing. The painting at top left and the girl’s hair far right all show detail that the older Fuji engine would have struggled with. Images got painterly a lot faster in the olden days :-)

Of course, I still favor RAW. Here, I have achieved a more open tone curve, but of course I could have done that to the JPEG as well. The results being a bit less predictable since the pixels are already somewhat bruised.

And then my wonderful C1 arrives. C1 is the designation on the menu … it’s some form of Thai curry I suspect and it is simply amazing. Here, I shoot it at 1600 ISO and 1/6s, which is low light in anyone’s book. This is the RAW image and I process it with white balance set for the plate with a bit of warmth added back in. The shadows are warmed a bit in the camera profile panel as the F550EXR does have a tendency to blue deep shadows under some circumstances.

You will not the wonderful steam coming off the dish … I love that look. The windows and everything lit by them are in blue tones. This because the interior is quite orange so when the blue channel is pushed to adjust white balance, the already blue / white outdoor light is greatly exaggerated. Nothing you can do about that except desaturate and I decided not to do that here.

 

Then I realized that I had not really done much with pro low light mode. So I set that and shot another image. I noticed three things immediately:

1. Brain fart. I shot in 3:2. Doesn’t hurt, but I prefer to get the whole frame while testing.
2. The four images are shot very quickly on this camera. Much quicker than on any other EXR that I can remember.
3. The magnification of this mode is quite high. I had to back off quite a bit to frame the whole plate and that changed the perspective. The rim of the plate is thinner in this shot, which is caused by the perspective change. Interesting …
4. I said three, but I just remembered #4. Even though the camera is set to provide RAW images, pro low light writes exactly one JPEG only.

The image came out so desaturated when compared with the RAW above that I took pity on it and performed some tweaking in ACR and CS5. I still prefer the RAW image, although this saturation might be a bit more accurate.

Because of the blending of four images, we lose the very clear steam imagery. That’s annoying. But otherwise, the image is nice. Not really any better than the processed 3200 ISO image, but still nice.

When I left the restaurant, I noticed a pigeon farting around on the pavement, searching for dinner [gag] … and shot him a couple of times before I realized that I was still in pro low light mode. And although he was walking about and I was following him, the images remain sharp and clear. That’s very interesting …

And at the very end, I shot one image in A prio mode again. This one came out slightly soft unfortunately, but I processed the RAW anyway and it is still pretty cool. He’s picking up some delicacy or other from the pavement … [shudder] …

So I think pro low light is very interesting … but maybe not quite as interesting as it once was. The high ISO on this beast is good enough that it really is not necessary to use pro low light and give up a RAW capture.

F550EXR – Changing my snow tires — Colossal Screw Up Leads to Bunnies

So there I was, enjoying a leisurely tire change. I got my little 3 gallon compressor pumped up and attached my air gun with the appropriate 13mm (IIRC) socket, grabbed my toy hydraulic jack and it’s little step to reach the bottom of my baby SUV and I was off.

But first I opened the windows and cranked up some tunes. I have a nice sub woofer and a decent deck with iPod connector so I was blasting some nice deep bass while I was working. I stopped after each tire to chat up one neighbor or another, they were out in the glorious sunshine.

By the time I reached the third tire, it had been pretty much two hours since I has started the job (did I mention leisurely?) And I started to hear my music stop and then restart. It did this three times before I got into the car to see what was going on. The whole unit was shutting off and coming back on, and that’s never a good thing.

To make a long story short(er), I had run the battery completely flat. So much so, that even after two hours of letting it soak in its own juices, it would not revive. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click …not good.

I popped into the garage to fetch the battery cables and then popped the hood and the hood of Nick’s old 98 Lumina, a very nice running car that has a nice big 6cyl engine and should do a great job.

Except the battery and terminals are hidden under a brace. Sh-t!

Plan B. Grab the battery out of the Honda (it was really old and past due for replacement anyway) and pop it into the back of the Lumina. Get the keys from the house and off we go.

Or maybe not. The car starts and runs great (first time in months) but it won’t budge. At all. I finally decide to see what a bit of gas will do and it starts to move, but under severe protest. The scraping sound tells me that only three tires are playing ball. The other is stubbornly refusing to turn. Again, sh-t!

Now this is getting a bit old. By performing my semiannual maintenance on my tires like a good soldier, I’ve managed to go from two happy cars to two broken cars and one of them has no battery and four open windows late on a Sunday afternoon. *sigh* …

I’ve been trying to think my way out of this, but there is nothing for it. I’ve rusted the brake drum all to heck. So now I grab the cross bar for the wheel nuts (not interested in getting the air gun all set up again) and grab the hydraulic toy without its step since this is a normal car, and just in case I feel the need to flip out on the car, I grab an axe.

Once the car is in the air and the wheel is on the ground, I grab the axe and hit the brake drum repeatedly with the back end of the head until the drum breaks loose and begins to turn. Once that happens I start hammering on it until I can get it off the bolts and expose the very rusty brake shoes.

After banging on the drum lying on the bricks to remove as much rust as possible, I put everything back together and again clean up the jack etc. Into the car and off we go. Lots of grinding and scraping as rust meets steel, but it moves without undue protest.

The brakes are awfully spongy though, so I stop at the local Home Depot lot, which is mostly empty on the side of the building and try to remember how to reset the rear brakes by driving in reverse and violently slamming on the parking break and then the real breaks. Somewhere in there, things tighten up a wee bit and off I go to Canadian Tire.

Which is closed. So I head off to Wal-Mart, which is reliably open even late Sunday evening. Except for the auto parts counter, which is closed. *sigh* …

I ponder total failure after all this hassle and while I am wiping the tears away (figuratively) I spot a great rack. Row upon row of fresh new batteries. Joy!

To make a tedious story finally end, I look in the book and find the battery that matches. They have exactly one. Grab it and carry it across the whole store (anyone who has ever carried one of these things knows that they are heavy.) Once home, my Honda is back up and running in minutes. And now I have two working cars again. Happy day …

Yes, that is an Energizer Bunny under my hood … the mystery title is finally resolved …

F550EXR – My Garden 2011 — Just Getting Started

Not much to say yet … we’re North American zone 5b I believe, which is really just to say that plants need to be fairly hardy to tough out the winters here. My original home town of Winnipeg is Zone 2, so plants have to be almost made of ice to survive. Kidding … their English gardens are pretty amazing …

Anyway, as I starting showing around mid-April, my French Lilac was budding then. It has now progressed to tiny florets, which means that next week we’ll be seeing flowers.

And, of course, the tulips are not to be outdone. These are some form or other of hybrid tulips, and I have always been led to believe that these things won’t come back year after year. And yet these things have been going a long time now … at least 5 years. And here they come again …

The rain has helped to green things up … and of course Photoshop made no small contribution :-)

Nikon D300 prime versus mega-zoom versus F550EXR – Lens Test for CA and Sharpness

This is a rather eclectic test, mixing in several variables and factors and so is useful mainly for observational purposes. In other words, I did not state a hypothesis and then craft a test to prove or disprove it. No scientific method in this one. Sorry.

Anyway, I noted that my el-cheapo Velbon tripod from a century ago was standing in sunlight against a window with the sun hitting the top of it. This created an interesting test subject … dark subject in silhouette with harsh edges bathed in strong sunlight creates a natural test of resolution, shadow noise and chromatic aberration or purple fringing.

Cool.

I was holding the D300 with the 85mm 1.8D mounted, a combination I almost never shoot. What I noticed right away was that it had staggering amounts of fringing when shot wide open. This makes some sense, of course, since fast lenses will do that when overexposed (I shot using spot metering to open the shadows right up, which blew out the edges completely.) Stopping down is normally the cure, so it struck me to run a quick test by shooting at 1.8 on up.

The way I shoot fast lenses is to go just above wide open, in this case f/2 instead of f/1.8. This gives an uptick in performance (better contrast and sharpness) with little loss in subject isolation. So it made sense to include those two apertures and then run a standard ladder … 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11.

After I was done with that, I thought I might try the 18-200VR, since it is so often maligned. And then I thought the F550EXR might make an interesting counterpoint, since it is also often maligned.

The D300 was set to 500 ISO to help the 85 get shutter speeds that were not terrible, as I was hand holding this test (what did I say about the informality of this one ...) In fact, all images were crisp except for f/11. 1/30s is just a little too slow for an effective focal length of 127.5mm hand held.

So let’s see the crops and then I’ll give my observations.

• The colors captured by the 85mm are most accurate. The others are a bit too warm.
• Fringing is rampant on the 85 until 2.8, where it is pretty subtle. It is completely gone by 5.6.
• Sharpness on the 85 improves at f/2 and again at 2.8. Contrast continues to improve slightly, peaking around f/5.6. Amazing lens.
• The 18-200 has some CA wide open, but not all that bad. About equivalent to the 85mm at f/4.
• The 18-200 never reaches the same sharpness as the 85, but is still sharp. Enough that a downsized image is not going to be wildly different looking. Of course, the concept of “bite” in a lens is a subtle thing in the first place. A lot to do with subject isolation and micro-contrast. The 85 has some bite and the 18-200VR does not.
• The F550 is completely outclassed, despite a 2.33 stop advantage in ISO.
• Shadow noise is rampant on the F550, as would be expected on a 1/2” sensor.
• CA (not the blue variety, nor purple fringing) is rampant on the F550, as would be expected from a 15x lens on a $350 camera.
• The F550 image is still fairly sharp, though, so processing it with noise reduction software and improving contrast would provide a decent image.

Conclusion

A fun test. The prime is amazing, although it makes no sense as a wide open bright sunlight lens (which makes no sense anyway.) The 18-200VR is as good as I remember it … sharper than most people credit.

So what is the secret sauce here? Why am I seeing the 18-200VR (1st generation no less) as quite sharp when so many people lambaste it for for sharpness?

The answer is that I perform appropriate capture sharpening in ACR 6.4 on every image in order to overcome the anti-aliasing filter and any inherent lack of sharpness in the lens. This cannot add real sharpness that is not there, which is why the 85 looks better no matter what I do.

But it can allow all of the sharpness that is there to become visible. So yes, the prime took a bit less capture sharpening and so is even that little bit better than shown here, relative to the others.

But that’s the whole point of RAW processing. If you are not going to take advantage of the quality tools that are available, then you really cannot call yourself an enthusiast. By definition, someone who does not process is a point and shooter. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to leave a lot of image quality on the table …