Family, Photography and other misc news
A warm sunny commute into the office today, that certainly made a change. Lets hope the weather stays nice till the end of the week as its the County Show this week.
The last few times I have been to the Lincolnshire Show, I have been working there but this week its for pleasure. If I get any good photographs I’ll post a few up on Thursday night.
Still even if its raining, a good time can be had, I’ll take my Wellington Boots just in case.
The big news this week was that Nikon reached the 70 million mark in there lens production history.
To mark this they also released two new lens, one DX for those of us who have DX Cropped sensors and one 35mm full frame lens.
For the DX users we have the new 18-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR. A travel and all in one lens. Interesting but not for me.
For the full frame users, a new 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5G ED VR. A useful midrange small zoom for full frame users, not sure of this is going to appeal to the D4, D800 users, it does not look to have the image quality required for these bodies, maybe this means a budget FX body is on the way?
I always thought sharpening was a relatively straightforward process, but I have seen some rather heated discussions on forums, people confusing input sharpening, output sharpening and of course creative sharpening.
As mentioned above people generally divide sharpening into either two or three stages:
Why do we need to sharpen? A digital image is of course a pixelated image. Adjacent pixels may be the same but they may be very different. The camera tends to average out adjacent pixels that are very different in order to reduce the amount of apparent pixelation.
What sharpening does is increase the amount of edge contrast, basically it lightens the light side of the edge and darkens the dark side. Good sharpening software will only do this on the luminance values of the data and not affect the colour information.
There is not one set of rules that you can use for sharpening, different images need different settings. All I can advise is that you shoot RAW, don’t let your camera choose the sharpening level, and use a good third party sharpening tool. For import sharpening the best two are Adobe Lightroom and Camera RAW which is built into Photoshop (actually they are the same underline code and RAW development engine).
Creative sharpening can be used to highlight key areas. In the above shot import sharpening has been applied but also in the post production a reduction in mid tone contrast which has the result in softening the image slightly, this was done even more heavily on the skin town to make the skin look softer. The eyes, lips and hair then had there mid tone contrast increased and those areas selectively sharpened.
Finally, output sharpening, this adds the sharpening needed to suite the output media, above I used a relatively high for screen setting. If the output was for print it would have to go even higher and would look decidedly crusty on-screen.
This week is Apple’s Developer conference and in the opening speech yesterday as well as the Software announcements was the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, this could be excellent news for Photographers.
Not so sure about them dropping the Firewire Ports but they did say a FW to ThunderPort Adapter will be available so Photographers like me with lots of external FW drives will not feel left out.
I have to admit I am tempted as my MacBook Pro is now four years old, if I upgrade to a Nikon D800 this year then the new MacBook Pro will be an essential upgrade. Until then I can wait. I’ll be interested in how shiny the new display is as well as the Colour Gamut.
It would be nice to be able to do colour critical work on a laptop, but i’ll not hold by breath.
Cooler weather seems to have set in now, we had a few cold rides into work on the BMW GS last week.
We are looking forward to better weather next month as we have a week free so are planning a motorcycle tour. We cannot go too far but I want to see the sea and some mountains, so that really rules out England.
Time to get the Maps out.
When we had the warmer weather we had to fight for a bike parking space at the office, but now its cooled, there was only two bikes there today and that was including mine!
In the British Isles if you only rode on sunny days you would not get out much.
We have lived with the Bayer filter based digital camera design for many years now. Every so often someone comes out with something that will get over the limitations, but generally the advantages also have major disadvantages.
The big problem with Bayer filter cameras is the resolution is not as high as stated, they interpolate the data, are prone to Moire, and most have an anti-aliasing filters which blurs the image slightly to reduce the Moire.
The big splashes to hit the camera news recently has been the Light-field camera and the foveon sensor, and of course this month the Leica Monochrom a Black & White Sensor.
Light-field; while the theory has been with us since about 1908, its still more of a toy then a usable product. Its basically a sensor technology that does not need to be focused. Check out Steve Huff’s website for more information.
Foveon is a more interesting technology and a true rival for Bayer based sensors. Instead of having coloured filters in front of each pixel its a sensor that can actually see in colour thus you get far higher resolution then indicated by the megapixel count. It suffers a little from underdevelopment as its owned and solely used now by Sigma.
Generally modern Bayer based sensors have kept there lead, with megapixel counts in 35mm now at 36MP and with that count increasing each year, the need for anti-aliasing filters is becoming less, so the actual resolution is increasing even more.
In recent resolution tests the bare sensored Leica Monochrom which its 18MP sensor, lacking the Bayer filter and the anti-aliaising filter was more then a match for the new Nikon D800E which has 36MP and no anti-aliasing filter, but it was a close call.
Throwing more megapixels at the problem is so far keeping the Bayer filter ahead but lets hope someone comes out with a technology that gives us a purer solution. For a while then I think the Bayer filter based sensor is here to stay.
If your interested in digital processing check out the Chromasoft blog, he has some very interesting findings about Fuji’s none standard Bayer filter used in the new Fuji X1 Pro.
With the recent spring weather as well as Landscapes I have been shooting some Wildlife with my Nikon V1. I am now getting to know all the issues with the camera.
Some are very minor others more of a problem.
The main problems are:
The other issues are fairly minor, it would be nice to be able change the focus mode and iso quickly instead of having to scroll through the menu. In many ways the mode dial on the back is pointless and should be either got rid of or move the modes buried in the sub menus onto it. Hiding the Aperture, Shutter and Manual modes does not make sense.
It’s a great camera and I wish Nikon would see the point of producing a more professional version but from comments I have seen they don’t see the point or they don’t want to risk cannibalising the sales of their low end SLR’s.
The problem is if Nikon do not produce a high end model then Sony, Panasonic, Olympus and Fuji will do there best to produce a camera that will appeal to us. With cameras like the Sony NEX-7, the Panasonic DMX-GX-1, the new Olympus OM-D E-M5, the sublime but also focus challenged Fuji X100 and new X Pro1, we have many options available to us.
As you can see from the samples I have posted above, and some of the street photography, I have done and posted over the last few days, image quality is very good for such a small sensor, and the EVF is excellent and the autofocus second to none. It is a great handling camera, lets hope Nikon can build on it.
A few more shots from yesterday and the previous week. As you can see, I am in a Black & White mood with the Nikon V1 again. I’ll post a few thoughts about how I am getting on with the camera in the my first six months with it later this week.
Of all the little compact cameras I have tried, while it can be frustrating to use sometimes, the built in viewfinder more then makes up for it.
This weekend we are celebrating the Diamond Jubilee, for us in the UK we are enjoying a four day weekend, as we get an extra bank holiday in order to enjoy the celebrations.
Our local village has the bunting out, and we have had parties, live music and much to enjoy.
Walking round the village many people have had there camera’s out making the most of the opportunities.
Its certainly been a good weekend for photographic opportunities.
I read a number of blogs, and each one is focused on a particular subject.
Many are about photography, or about photographic gear. Others about Motorcycling, Flying and cooking.
My blog has a number of functions. Primary it’s like my diary, I look back over time and see what has happened, it’s also a record of my photographic and motorcycling trips.
I sometimes ask what do I want from my blog. Most blog readers want a targeted blog detailing and being focused on there interests.
My blog while primary about photography does drift off sometimes onto other subjects. I hope you will continue to bear with me while I sometimes blog about subjects that may be off no interest to you.