Community Matters

This may seem like a silly problem to have – but I tend to hate pictures of myself. But with Twitter and many other social media services (and blogs, and wikis where you are supposed to introduce yourself) it turns out that having a good picture of yourself is very useful – first impressions matter.

I actually found a picture that I like – taken by James Duncan Davidson during my OSCON 2008 keynote.

Understandably his terms on Flickr restrict reuse of his work, but when I asked him he was kind enough to allow me to use a crop of this as my avatar. Super nice!

As I pointed out before, Nikon is a bit lacking in large aperture prime lenses. So I’m very excited that Nikon added an AF-S 24mm f/1.4 ED lens. I wish I could say “I preordered mine” – but at an expected street price of $2200 (around $500 more than the comparable Canon lens) I don’t think this is within reach any time soon.

Still, it is a step in the right direction and hopefully more lenses in this range will follow. A Nikkor AF-S 28mm f/1.4 ED or AF-S 30mm f/1.4 ED lens would be extremely welcome by the market, I think.

Also announced was an AF-S 16-35mm f/4 ED VR lens. I’m a bit more ambivalent about this lens. VR doesn’t seem to be as important on a wide angle lens – yet f/4 versus f/2.8 to me is a pretty significant step back. Of course the AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED with a street price of about $1600 is even more expensive than the new 16-35mm f/4 (which is expected to start selling at $1260).

I have the old Nikkor AF 20-35mm f/2.8D lens which sadly has been out of production for almost a decade, but still is easily found at less than half the price of this new lens. I love that lens and use it quite frequently – it does of course lack a bit of range on the wide angle side and the VR – but it gives you f/2.8 for a lot less money.

Peter Schütte is a local photographer here in Portland who does wonderful Oregon Photo Workshops – if you are a beginner or a more advanced photographer, check out his site and the classes that he offers. They are a lot of fun and extremely instructional – I certainly have learned a lot from him and can’t wait to find the time again to go to another workshop this summer.

I’ve already done his Central Oregon High Desert Safari, the Portland at Night and the North Coastal Photography workshops (and a couple others that I’m forgetting right now). Definitely worth it.

I posted a while ago about Nikon’s lack of large aperture prime lenses. And apparently this problem hasn’t escaped Nikon’s attention. After releasing an updated AF-S 50mm f/1.4G a few weeks ago, Nikon has added yet another large aperture prime, this time it’s first large apperture lens that is designed for DX cameras, the AF-S DX 35mm f/1.8G (in case you wonder, their first DX prime lens was the AF DX 10.5mm f/2.8G fisheye).

This lens doesn’t replace the full frame AF 35mm f/2.0D but instead adds a cheaper, smaller, lighter and faster lens especially for DX cameras. Reactions online have been a bit mixed, some people lamenting that it’s “only” a 1.8 and “only” a DX lens, but I think these people are missing the boat. Most Nikon shooters these days have a DX camera. And unless they are seriously considering a switch to one of the FX bodies any time soon, for them an FX prime just adds unnecessary weight and size and cost. Yes, I’d rather have seen an f/1.4 lens and I’d have preferred a 30mm or 28mm lens as their first entry (I tend to find a “52mm-equivalent” lens a little too long for many typical low-light situations, e.g. shooting indoors), but I think this is a great step in the right direction and hopefully we’ll see several more lenses follow, maybe even the new 28mm f/1.4 lens that so many of us are waiting for.

I certainly am going to look at buying the lens once it comes out (so far no one appears to take pre-orders, yet).

This seems to be a feature that doesn’t get a lot of attention – but I think it’s widely underestimated. Nikon DSLRs like the D300, D700, D3, D3x, D90 (and many of the older ones – but I don’t know exactly when this started) allow you to use the ISO sensitivity like a third parameter when calculating exposure!

Traditionally people think of the ISO value as fixed (I guess this comes from the day of using film that has a given ISO value) and then look for a matching f-stop and shutter speed that creates correct exposure.

The f-stop is limited by what your lens has to offer. f/1.4 or 1.8 on a fast prime lens like the 50mm/f1.4. f/2.8 on an expensive zoom like the Nikon 24-70mm/f2.8 I played with last weekend. Or something slower like f/5.6 on the cheap “kit lenses” most cameras get sold with.

And the shutter speed is limited by the slowest speed that you can take a picture at without it getting fuzzy because of the jitter of your hands. In the old days people used the rule of thumb of 1 divided by the focal length of your lens (so 1/50s for a 50mm lens, etc). Today with VR you usually can push this quite a bit slower – I often take shots at 1/50s with a 200mm lens.

But what do you do if you are in a low light situation? Indoors without flash, in the shade, at dawn, etc? Well you could of course increase your ISO value, but likely you’ll get it wrong. And if you crank up your ISO too high you get too much noise, but if you don’t go high enough, your shutter speed will be to slow and you will get a picture that isn’t crisp. Oh and this of course takes time and attention and you risk losing that perfect shot you’ve been waiting for.

The solution: auto-ISO. Here you can tell your Nikon the slowest shutter speed you are willing to allow. And you set your ISO to a reasonable value that gets you low-noise pictures (I tend to have it at ISO200). Then as long as there is enough light, you’ll get the best possible picture at ISO200. But once it gets darker, instead of forcing a slow shutter speed, the camera increases the ISO in order to keep the shutter speed no slower than the value that you picked. I much rather take a picture at maximum aperture, 1/50s and ISO800 than at 1/12s and ISO200. The first one will be nice and crisp, the second one is almost certain to be fuzzy due to the jitter of my hands when taking the picture – and potentially the movement of my subject.

Is this a miracle cure? Of course not. At some point it’s just too dark. Depending on the camera you use, there’s an upper limit to useful ISO values. A D300 takes great pictures up to about ISO1000 (some noise, but easy to deal with). A D3 or D700 allows you to go all the way to ISO3200 and still be happy with most pictures. But once you go beyond that, you’ll still get noisy pictures.

But this still adds something like 3-4 more f-stops to what you can do with your camera without this (and without having to manually change the ISO setting – which likely means you’ll miss the shot).

Try it out!

One of my reasons for buying a higher end DSLR was the ability to do great low light photography, especially inside my house in the morning or evening – without the need for a flash. And one of my biggest disappointments since picking a Nikon D300 was the lack of fast (or large aperture) lenses from Nikon. In general, the Nikon branded lenses work much better with a Nikon body than after market lenses (there are lots of stories about problems with the Sigma 30mm f/1.4, for example). Yet if you want a lens that is faster than f/2.8 on your Nikon, the selection is really limited.

You can get the 50mm f/1.4D, the 50mm f/1.8D and the 35mm f/2.0D lens. And that’s it.

Compare that to more than a dozen Canon lenses from 24mm to 200mm with f/2.0 or better. Nikon, please wake up and give us better lenses!

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!

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.