D700 Bokeh ... Or, The Great Underwear Expedition

Ok, that probably sounded silly. But in fact, today I dropped by the Mountain Equipment Coop in order to pick up some long johns for photography in the cold. I am tired of freezing half to death and I want to be able to snow show and walk outdoors without being in constant pain ...

So ... I picked up a nice mid-weight set made with the latest technologies that wick away your sweat etc ... and got into a conversation with a nice young man who noted that I was carrying a large camera bag with me (I had the whole kit with me and was not about to leave it in the car.) Turns out he shoots whitewater rafting ... way cool. He mentioned where I could get access to the place where they do this stuff so I could shoot it next year ... sounds like a lot of fun.

Anyway ... I also needed decent gloves for shooting and general hacking around, and he took me over to the glove spot and set me up with really nice tight fitting liners and big snow-proof mitts ... a great two layer system. I pulled out the D700 to test it with the liners and they worked perfectly. No problems with any of the controls ... I got this shot of him to test.


Note the terrific bokeh ... and the rack of clothes he was leaning against is nicely blurred just over his shoulders as well ... I'm really impressed as this was the Tamron 28-75 at 75mm and f/2.8 ... the 85mm 1.8 would have been even better. I love this camera :-)

By the way ... if you happen to be at MEC, grab this guy if you see him ... he's really good.

I was finally back in my car and noted that Jon had texted me that he was out of his exam already (actually, I had beef and rice noodle soup -- very Pho-like -- at the Phnom Phen restaurant on Wellington street in between) and I went back to pick him up. We dropped by Carlingwood shopping mall for some Christmas shopping (duh) and he wanted to grab a bite.

While we were sitting in the food court, eating truly evil food, I caught a few images of him to test the cam in horrible lighting. Backlit with almost no light on the face.

Here is Jon's obligatory "talk to the hand" pose ...


And a couple of him drinking and munching his poutine from New York Fries ... (and half of mine, as I did not really like it.)



Shot wide open at 2.8 ... excellent clarity and superb bokeh in my opinion. Very neutral and smooth. This is a great lense for the price ... no question.

Winter Photography

My tests of the Fuji F70EXR and the Panny ZS3 have had my hands frozen to blocks of ice ... and the rest of me not in much better shape. I've decided that I think I need to figure out how to survive in the cold properly to get these wonderful images.

A couple of other bloggers have put up some superior articles on exactly this topic, so I thought I would share them.

Sherry Osborne posted an article called Photography in the Extreme Cold on the Digital Photography School blog. You'll find several great tips on how to dress and how to protect your gear. You'll also find a link to a great article on photography mittens on the Knitting on Impulse blog.


Although they look cute ... the real secret is that they have exactly one opening in them, with which you may extract a finger to twiddle a dial or button. Warm and cozy, yet functional. Very clever. I wonder where I could get a pair of those ... any knitters out there wanna take a stab?

Panasonic ZS3 versus Fuji F70EXR -- round 5C -- Snow and Sunset Revisited

A Fuji Talk Forum member, Richard Graef, asked me to post out of camera (OOC) images for the water and snow shots from round 5. And so, without further ado, here they are ... untouched in any way except for downsizing.

Fuji OOC


Fuji Processed


Panny OOC


Panny Processed


Fuji OOC


Fuji Processed


Panny OOC


Panny Processed

Nick's Wizard Party 2009

Nick had a wizard party last night with some of his friends. For the uninitiated, a wizard party entails the purchase of enough beer to drink your height ... the mechanism is to drink a beer, then duct tape another can onto the empty and crack that beer and drink it. Repeat until you have a staff taller than you. At that point, you become a wizard.

Nick's friend RMac (Ryan) became a wizard first. His friend Staples (Chris) became a wizard second. Rowboat (Rob) was third, and Nick never made it. His friend Aaron drank from bottles and was thus ineligible to become a wizard, although he apparently drove the porcelain bus the next morning and so should be considered an honorary wizard.

They played the Nintendo 64 all evening (yes, you read that right ... in a house with an XBox 360 and a Sony PS3, they chose to play the old Nintendo) ... and was it ever LOUD. I have my bedroom door closed and the music on pretty loud and it was entirely overwhelmed ... :-)

Some images from the party ... not exhaustive, but you get the idea ...

Robbie tries to tape another beer onto his staff ... he has apparently purchased one of the few beers that cannot stack well ... by round 7 this is really, really funny ...


Round 7 begins ...


Much later ... round 10 I think ...


Pretty much the end of the party ... everyone if very happy :-)


Ryan ... Wizard #1 ...

D700 - How Good is the High ISO?

I've been impressed with the high ISO of the D3s, Nikon's latest high ISO flagship. There have been rather stunning 10,000 and 12,800 ISO images posted today. It appears that Nikon have pulled a rabbit out of their hats and given the D3s a 1 to 1.5 stop improvement over the D3 / D700 ...

This is simply amazing ... as 1.5 stops is about what you get when moving from APS-C to full frame sensors ... wow.

Anyway ... I thought I'd run my own little experiment this evening ... I shot an image of my D300 with my D700 ... once at 6400 ISO and once at 12800 ISO. These images were then converted in ACR with only minimal tweaking of the noise sliders. I added crops of the lens cap to show how the texture and chroma noise come out ...

I must say that I am quite impressed ... this camera is no D3s, but it certainly is quite clean at 6400 and not bad at all at 12800. I am looking forward to shooting it in dim situations ...

6400


12800


Not too shabby ...

Edit: I posted a denoised version of the 12800 ISO image (Topaz Denoise 3) on DPReview in response to a question, so here it is. This is not bad at all for web use. I bet I could squeeze out a decent 8x10 as well ...

Enormous Panorama of Dresden

Ok ... this is gonna blow your mind.

A post on the Fuji Talk Forum by member Fotonut reminded me that there is a site called GIGAPIXEL that displays enormous images ... many gigapixels in size ... that allow one to zoom in to see incredible detail.

The dresden shot is beautiful, and consists of 1,665 21.4mp images from a Canon 5D Mark II. It was recorded by a photo robot over 172 minutes and required 64 processors and 48GB RAM to process the 102GB of RAW imagery over 94 hours.

The final image has a resolution of 297,500 x 87,500 pixels, or 26GP ... that's pretty huge. If printed at a nominal 100 pixels per inch, i.e. billboard resolutions (and equivalent to your monitor resolution fully zoomed in) the image would be ... wait for it ... 247 feet wide :-)

I shit you not.

Here is a tiny version of the image that represents what you would see here ... click on it to see a bit more detail or click on that link to see the actual site ...


On the left side there is a bridge. A long bridge with several lanes ... in fact a couple of bridges if you zoom in. And if you zoom in all the way to the middle of the bridge, you will see a couple of guys working there ... and you will be astounded at how close you can get ...


Amazing stuff, GIGAPIXEL ... have a look.