Community Matters

If you want to get better flash pictures, the first thing you need to do is to move the flash off your camera. There are great resources telling you how to do this - Strobist might be my favorite.

Depending on the DSLR and external flash that you own, doing this might be easy. A Nikon D300 with SB-800 allows you to do off camera flash without any additional equipment (within some limits regarding distance and angle, for example).

But real flexibility requires a wireless remote trigger. The gold standard for this is the Pocket Wizard. Which is called the “gold” standard for a reason as it is really expensive. Since I didn’t want to spend USD 570 for a setup for two flashes I went with the ultra-cheap Cactus V2s instead. USD 50 for a setup for two flashes. That’s more like it.

I’ve had them for a week now and used them a few times and am really happy. Reliable, easy to use, sufficiently sturdily built. Highly recommended!

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I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

This little write-up is targeted at parents who never thought of photography as a hobby and now want to start taking pictures to document their children.

I’ll cover a few simple topics:

• what’s the right camera?
• what other equipment do I need?
• how can I manage these pictures on my computer?
• how can I print them / post them?

And of course we will also talk a bit about actually taking pictures - but the focus is the non-photographer trying to get started.

For this first part, we’ll assume that you don’t have a camera that you use every day (or if you do, then you are considering getting something that works better for this purpose). So we’ll start with the basics.

You definitely want a digital camera. I know there are areas where film is superior - taking pictures of your children is not one of them. First we’ll have to pick the type of camera that you want. A compact digital camera (often also called point-and-shoot camera or D-PnS) or a D-SLR (digital single lens reflex). D-PnS cameras are usually small cameras that use the built-in LC-display on the back of the camera to frame the picture. In contrast, on a D-SLR camera there is an optical viewfinder that uses the same lens as the actual image sensor. D-SLRs normally allow the user to change lenses, most of them don’t allow to use the LC-display on the back to preview the picture, but this is showing up as a feature on some newer D-SLRs like the Nikon D300 or the Canon EOS 40D.

Here’s an overly simplified table that compares the two groups. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we are basing this on “decent mainstream” cameras of each group at the time of this writing:

Note that I didn’t include Megapixels in this table. Once the camera has about 6Mpix, it doesn’t really matter. That’s enough for a full page print of your pictures. What is much more important to the quality of the pictures is the quality of the lens and the image sensor used. Which brings me to the key point here. Your goal is to take good pictures of your children. Point and shoot cameras are much smaller, much cheaper, but their main shortcoming tends to be the quality of the pictures that they take. This discussion necessarily has to make many generalizations, but one thing that I have seen consistently across all brands and all price ranges of point and shoot cameras is that the image sensors tend to create much noisier pictures at the same sensitivity settings as decent D-SLRs and that in general the color range and vibrance of the pictures is significantly inferior on the point and shoot models.

I guess it all comes back to “you get what you pay for”.

So what’s the recommendation? If you absolutely must have a tiny camera or absolutely cannot afford more than a couple hundred dollars, I guess you should go with one of the higher rated point and shoot cameras. But if you want good pictures, plan to print some of them or want to stretch what you can do when taking pictures of your child even the least bit - take the plunge and look at a D-SLR. This doesn’t have to be all that expensive.

You can get the entry level cameras from Canon and Nikon (these two brands are by far the leaders in the market and I’d suggest sticking with one or the other) including a decent lens for under $500; at the time of this writing, trusted online stores like B&H Photo have both the Canon Rebel XT with an 18-55mm lens and the Nikon D40, also with an 18-55mm lens available new for $470 and $500, respectively. I’ll try to keep this information updated as prices continue to fall and newer models replace these entry D-SLRs (and as a side note, if you click on the button on this site to get to B&H Photo and end up buying from them, I get a small affiliate bonus from them which would help offset some of the cost of maintaining this blog).

I take a lot of pictures. I average somewhere around 2500 a month these days. But I still think that there’s a lot that I can learn. Especially about photography as art (instead of photography as documentation). So I have signed up for a few workshops with Peter Schütte. And was reminded again of the title of this blog. Community absolutely matters. You learn so much more when doing things with others, exchanging ideas, getting feedback and being able to ask questions. This is not something that was invented by software developers after all - it’s how we develop; in any skill.

I look forward to taking more classes and experiencing more of that great photography community.

I am a Lightroom user - have been since their very first public beta release. But this latest announcement from Apple has me interested in Aperture for the first time… tethered shooting, integrated into my digital asset management system? That would be great.

Apple says that they support only a few Nikon and Canon DSLRs. The list includes the Nikon D200, D300, and D3 as well as the D40x, D70, D80, D2Hs and D2Xs (that seems like a good list). On the Canon side they mention only the Rebel (not Rebel XT or XTi), 5D, 10D and 1Ds MkII - so basically all the recent Canon cameras are missing.

Let’s be honest, this is not enough to get me to migrate from Lightroom to Aperture - but maybe Adobe will integrate similar functionality into Lightroom?

Competition is good.

Today Nikon has released an update to the D300 firmware.

Looking at the changes this might not be a critical update for everyone. The only modification listed is “An issue that, in rare cases, caused vertical bands (lines) to appear in images captured at shutter speeds slower than 8s has been resolved.”

Still, it might not hurt to upgrade.

Here’s an interesting observation. Under otherwise identical settings, autofocus feels much faster and reliable with a faster lens. Sounds embarrassingly obvious, right? But I think it’s something a lot of people do not take into account when buying lenses!

I did some experiments with the Nikon D300 (which has a very fast and accurate autofocus system - 51 points, different tracking modes, the works) and two great lenses of different maximum aperture (which is conversationally called “speed” for lenses). The f/2.8 lens not only allows you faster shutter speeds compared to an f/5.6, it also does a better job at quickly acquiring correct focus.

I used a Nikon AF-S 80-200mm f/2.8D and a Nikon AF-S DX VR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED for comparison. Both are AF-S lenses with fast focus motor built into the lens. I used both at 200mm, focussing on the same sequence of subjects from about 10 feet away to several hundred feet away in otherwise identical circumstances. Lighting was reasonable but not extremely bright (ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/60s-1/125s, depending on the subject).

While I wasn’t able to use a stop watch to get absolute times (not enough hands, I guess), there’s a noticeable difference in the time it took the camera to be in focus. It’s hard to put a ratio to it, but my guess would be somewhere between 50% and 200% slower on the f/5.6, depending on the subject. There’s also a more than twice as high likelihood that the first attempt at focus is incorrect (the camera thinks it acquired focus, but it actually didn’t). I did 20 attempts switching between subjects close by and further away; I twice had to refocus with the f/2.8 lens, five times(!) with the f/5.6 lens.

The explanation seems easy enough. Focus acquisition is always at maximum aperture - so the f/2.8 lens gets four times the amount of light to the sensor than the f/5.6 lens. And that clearly makes a lot of difference.

Don’t get me wrong, the 18-200 is a wonderful all-round lens (I bought it explicitly to take with me when going to a park or doing something else in bright sunlight); I was simply curious to see if there was a downside to the reduced amount of light available when focusing. And it turns out there is.

It’s one of the things that I like about the D300: the built-in flash can trigger an external flash like the SB-800 or the SB-600 without any need for additional equipment. But having used this option quite a bit for the past month I also learned about a couple of its downsides.

For one thing, the D300 really slows down the shooting frequency when you use the built-in flash. No Continuous shooting mode (only the first picture gets a flash), and even in Single shot mode there’s a noticeable delay between pictures; I use the battery grip so the cycle time shouldn’t be that long - my guess is this is all trying to prevent over-heating of the flash.

The second downside is kind of obvious. You always have the frontal flash as part of the picture composition. Yes, via the menu that controls the CLS settings for the flash you can tell the camera to underexpose the built-in flash and to compensate by over-exposing the secondary flash, but this seems more like a kludge to me.

I looked at PocketWizards but find them a bit too expensive for my liking. I also looked at the Gadget Infinity wireless trigger that keeps getting mentioned on Strobist (btw: one of the best sites out there about off-camera flash photography). But the more I read the more I wonder about their reliability.

I can’t wait to see reviews of the RadioPopper. Sounds almost too good to be true. So far this seems to hit the sweet spot of price and functionality. But now they actually need to deliver that in real life.

In the meantime I’ve done a few shots with a cable based off-camera flash setup (using HH cable and a hot-shoe adapter, both left over from my experiments with the Rebel XT; on the D300 with an SB-800 one could of course simply use a PC cable), but frankly that’s just way more trouble than it’s worth. So I will get one of the wireless solutions at some point; I guess after the RadioPoppers ship and have been reviewed.

The very positive comments on the D300’s dynamic range were one of the reasons why I ended up buying it. And so far I have been thrilled with the results. The amount of details it preserves both in highlights and in dark areas is very impressive. Especially at higher ISO values.

Today I found an article at KammaGamma that did some much more scientific analysis of the dynamic range of the D300, comparing it directly to the D200. They don’t have similar tests for the Rebel XT or the 40D, but if you use the Comparometer at imaging resource you can actually look at full size high ISO pictures taken under identical conditions with the D300, the 40D and the Rebel XTi (they have some pictures for the Rebel XT as well, but not the high ISO ones). Once again, very impressive results - clearly showing the improved dynamic range, especially at higher ISO settings.

But the most amazing article comparing the current crop of Canon and Nikon DSLRs that I’ve seen so far is this review at Luminous Landscape. It’s long, but it gives so many insights and details that in my mind it is really worth a read.

I love the D300 for low light photography without a flash - but of course flexibility to drive a flash or external strobe light is an important feature for a DSLR. And studying the manuals pointed me to two other advantages that the D300 has compared to the 40D.

1. Strobe sync speed through the PC connector is 1/250s on the Nikon D300 but only 1/60s with the Canon 40D; if you have reasonable ambient light and want to work with a large aperture, the 1/60s can get you enough ambient light onto the sensor that your picture appears slightly blurred if your subject moves
2. The fastest sync speed with dedicated flash units on the D300 is 1/8000s when using the SB-800, SB-600 or SB-R200. On the 40D the fastest sync speed is 1/250s, regardless of the flash that you use. This prevents you from doing some interesting types of shots (where you completely black out the background by going to a very fast shutter speed and using the flash to just light the foreground subject)

Since I really like to experiment with different flash settings and especially off-camera flash (more on that later) I think those are two major drawbacks of the 40D.

Update: As Ryan pointed out in the comment below, this may not be correct after all! While the documentation of the 40D doesn’t mention it (at least not that I could find it, and I spent a bit of time with the PDF and the search function of Acrobat Reader), it appears that you can make it do the long-pulse fast shutter sync up to 1/8000s, just like the D300, assuming you have the 580EX-II flash. As for the PC sync speed, Ryan doesn’t know for sure, either, but believes that it can do 1/250s as wel. I’d love to hear from people who have tried that…

I’ve had my Nikon D300 for about two weeks now, have taken more than 2000 pictures with it and must say that I love it.

It’s very fast - whatever you do; you never feel like you are using a digital camera (which always has this assumption of the horrible delays of the early models - I remember my first digital camera that had something like a one second shutter delay - the D300 has 45 milliseconds). The autofocus is not perfect - especially in low light and with fast moving subjects - but it is amazing compared to anything that I’ve used before. I shoot in “continuos low” mode at 3fps most of the time “continuos servo AF” and “3D tracking”. And even if a few frames in the series are not perfectly in focus (and since this is indoors without a flash and a 1.4 aperture, the moment the focus isn’t 100% perfect, it’s out of focus), the vast majority of the pictures are in focus. Which is just awesome.

As I expected, Auto-ISO mode is a real killer-feature; the D300 ensures that my shutter times don’t get to slow and pushes up the ISO value instead. And even at ISO1600 there is very little noise - it shows a lot more at ISO3200 and HI-1 (i.e., ISO6400), but the pictures are still usable. Some post-processing noise cancellation in photoshop usually gets them to a point where I can use them online and even make decent prints.

I am still struggling with “which control wheel controls what” - many of the functions require you to hold a button and turn one of the two wheels (whether it’s changing the mode from P to A to S to M, shifting the aperture/time combination in P mode, selecting the aperture in A more or the shutter speed in S more, compensating exposure, yet name it). And somehow my brain (and my fingers) haven’t learned which wheel to use for what. Maybe I’m just slow, maybe it’s unintuitive - the jury is still out.

But overall - simply an amazing camera. An amazing step up from the Canon Rebel XT.

I’m planning to post more on what works and tips and tricks over the next few weeks - stay tuned.