Strange and Weird Pictures

[John in MA]

That's probably a 4.5-5.6, right? Standard lens when a body is sold these days. The range is a little narrow and it's a little slow, but Doug's right. Most of a photo's look comes from you. Interesting filters and creative expsoure can go a long way. Try doing things on aperture priority and give some thought to depth of field, for starters. Then work your way more into the photo taking process.

Anyway, a few more lenses never hurt. Maybe get a 28-80 for general snapshots. A medium zoom like a 75-200 and a 2X teleconvertor is good for portraits or longer shots. After that, a 50mm prime lens, <28mm wide angles, and one of those prolific, cheap preset 500mm f/8 telephotos. That last one's based on my habit of buying stuff like that. Go with a 600mm f/2.8 if you can swing it.

I got into MD Minoltas years back, then switched to a Maxxum 7000 recently. Old and slow, but does the job. Accepting donations of Maxxum 7's currently.

 

[dbabcock]

Have your doctor ready with the nitro pills when you get that 600mm f/2.8 (actually, it's an f/4). Something in the neighborhood of $9,000 if you go with Nikon.

 

[John in MA]

Are you sure that they didn't make a 600/2.8? I could swear I was reading a Nikon equipment rundown with that listed.

Most folks wouldn't think about it, but Pentax actully has a real shocker in their lineup. A 250-600mm f/5.6 zoom with a price tag over over 10 grand. Something like 15 pounds.

 

[Toddppm]

just trying to see if this works

 

[dbabcock]

800mm f/5.6, 600 f/4, 500 f/4, 400 f/2.8, 300 f/2.8. Nikon's "Baseball Lens" is a custom order 1200-1700mm f/5.6 zoom that's almost 36" long and 35 lbs. Six month lead time with a 30 grand nonrefundable deposit. Total cost a couple of years ago was 85 grand. My 400mm f/2.8 is 13 lbs. complete with it's two piece carbon fiber hood.

By the way, most of the less expensive catadioptric lenses aren't too bad if you have a specific application for a 500mm lens with a fixed aperature. My friend has a Meade that was real short money. He likes it, but the fixed aperature tends to be very limiting. It's also nice not to have points of light out of the focus range turn into circular halos as all mirror lenses will do.

Here's one combo that I use for flash fill at a distance. Camera is Nikon F5, lens is Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 AFS, TC-20E 2X teleconverter for total equivalent of 800mm @ f/5.6, flash is Nikon SB-28 with a freznel magnifier that buys you about 3 stops.

 

[John in MA]

What the **** do you use a 1200-1700 zoom for? Seems like kind an odd thing, considering the range vs. size and weight.

I've never really been a fan of cat lenses. The bargain-basement models frequently have a slight mirror misalignment, or soon develop one. The preset Japanese refractor 500mm lenses have been good to me. I'd probably only consider a cat if I was looking for something in the 1000mm range, and there's a good Russian version of that.

Do you do much work with slave flashes?

 

[bwalker]

Doug, Since your the camera guy I would like to pick your brain. Is there a digital cam that will take high quality pics with out braking the bank? Keep in mind I am not ahobbiest like you. I just want somehting that takes good shapes without spending thousands of clams. I have an olympus d-370 right now and it stinks. Didnt expect much from it as it was the cheapest one I could get my hands on at the time.

 

[glens]

Ben,

Please allow me to recommend something.&nbsp; I've been happier with Sony in the past than more recently, but they are currently offering digital cameras with Carl Zeiss lenses.&nbsp; There aren't many optic systems out there as good as, let alone better, than Zeiss.&nbsp; Certainly not without requiring some bank-breaking to acquire them.

Here is a link to an overview of an attractive model: http://www.digital-cameras-info.com/sony-digital-cameras/sony_dscs85_reviews.html

Here it is at "home": http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INT...cc&CatalogCategoryID=T1oKC0.Nw9UAAADyfni0k8GI

And a frame found via http://www.zeiss.com/, http://www.zeiss.de/C12567A8003B58B9/InhaltWWWIntern/3BDD42906A6E0D0241256A53002D6AC5

Enjoy,
Glen

 

[dbabcock]

John,
The 1200-1700 was originally designed for sports photography where the distances to the subjects were not only long, but were somewhat fixed as well. Many of the big guns adopted this lens for shooting baseball games because they couldn't get close enough and at least it gave them some adjustability. I heard once that Nikon only sold maybe a half a dozen a year.

Below is a comparison of the 1200-1700 and your average, everyday 600mm f/4 EDIF. Keep in mind that the 600/4 is in the neighborhood of the 400/2.8 in size and you can see how big that is compared to the camera in my picture above.

 

[dbabcock]

Ben,
Sorry, but I really haven't kept up with the little digital cameras. My wife has a Nikon Coolpix 995 that she uses occasionally. My son has a Nikon Coolpix 5000. We've had no problems with these. I have no particular brand loyalty, I just get good deals on Nikons.

With regard toward Glen's comments about the Sony, most of John Lambert's pictures were taken with a Sony digital. Most of the differences between cameras in the same price range in the sub $1000 arena, take the form of feature sets and reliability rather than ultimate picture quality. Yes, you can tell the difference between respective pictures, but in most cases you'd have to have them sitting right next to each other to do it.

Carl Zeiss makes some of the best lenses around. I traded one, even up, for a brand new 3120. I'm sure that the optical quality of the Zeiss glass is right up there at the top of the heap for these smaller cameras. Unfortunately, the overriding limitation in these small aperature lenses isn't the glass (it's easy to make a good small lens), but diffraction distortion caused by the necessarily small aperatures involved. As good as they are, even Zeiss can't get around the laws of physics.

 

[glens]

Hi Doug.&nbsp; There are only a couple of the Sony cameras which sport the Zeiss glass, and the floppy disk ones (which I think I recall John mentioning) are not among them.

I was turned on to Zeiss by a buddy about 20 years ago who'd picked up a miniature Rollei at a pawn shop and taken it to the top of Mt. McKinley.&nbsp; He had some square prints 24 inches on a side which were tack-sharp everywhere.&nbsp; I knew it was a little cartridge-based camera, and was thinking it was a 110, but have today determined that it had to have been the <a href="http://www.rolleiclub.com/rollei/26/index.htm">SL26</a> with the 40mm lens.

I'm not up on current trends in digital cameras either, but when I do pick one up in the fairly near future, it will have to have some hellacious features to offset the Zeiss glass, or I'm going with a Sony.&nbsp; The concerns about Sony products (in general) I alluded to earlier do pertain to reliability, however, so that will certainly have to be researched more carefully regarding their cameras.&nbsp; It pretty much used to be that a Sony product was bullet-proof, but they appear to have sunk into the common pool somewhat.&nbsp; I guess we're seeing that just about everywhere these days.

Your concerns in the tail of your last paragraph seem to be addressed somewhat in the (obviously marketing-oriented) deep-linked Zeiss page I showed Ben.

In most cases that I've seen, differences between similar images require simultaneous viewing to note.&nbsp; At times the differences can be very much more alarming than you'd think while viewing them separately.&nbsp; In the sub-$1000 range, though, with adequate glass the ultimate resolution is undoubtedly going to be limited by the pixel size itself.

In the end, it's like (I think it was) you (who) recently said, the equipment is the easy part.

Glen

 

[Gypo Logger]

I have had really good luck with the Sony FD88 floppy. It will do the job for most consumers. It takes very reasonable pictures and will so a 5-15 sec movie as well. It will hold 5-20 pictures depending on the format used.
I also have a Sony CD300 will Zeiss lens. It has a 156MB RW compact disc, and will hold up to 700 pictures.
I hope to soon be buying a Nikon D100, so I can get more involved in photography, with the added advantage of being able to borrow Doug's lenses.
John

 

[dbabcock]

I think that ultimate picture size and viewing environment has a lot to do with how many pixels you need. Let's face it, if you want to post pictures on AS, catering to the 72-150ish dpi resoultion of monitors, then whether you have a 6 MP camera or a 2MP doesn't really matter all that much. Same thing if you want to print out full frame 3 X 5's or 5 X 7's. Of course, when you decide to crop a small portion of the picture and blow it up, then the pixel density will really get into the act. This is why digital zooms suck. At the 5-6 MP level of current large CCD's (the ones in the pro digital SLR's), the optics and frontend optical comb filters really do have a significant impact on ultimate resolution. I've done comparison tests of picture reolution with the D1 (2.7MP), the D1X (aspect ratio modified 5.4 MP) and the Coolpix 5000 (5+ MP) cameras and I can tell you that once you upsample the original picture file from the camera to say, 8X10, the D1X wins in resolution, but not by as much as you might think. Next, comes the D1 and slightly below that, the 5000. Now, admittedly, the much larger CCD of the D1 helps out considerably here over the small 5000 array, but to overcome a deficit of 2X the number of pixels says that something else is going on. Ultimate resolution and acheivable resolution are two entirely different things. Clearly, the optics are getting into the act.

Be very careful about comparing resolution of digital cameras when using any form of lossy compression, aka: jpeg. For most prints that really matter, I use either lossless tiff, or direct CCD (Nikon .nef), then postprocess in Bibble or Qimage. When upsampling for final print size, I usually just use PS's bicubic. When the final print gets larger than about 11 X14, I sometimes switch over to Genuine Fractals rather than bicubic. What GF does is essentially rasterizes the data, so there really aren't any more pixels. Once you do something like this to the picture, comparing pixel resolution becomes meanless.

A comment or two about the smaller cameras. They're great for stills, landscapes and convenience. They're not so good for action, ultimate picture quality and versatility. If you want to take snapshots of chainsaws sitting on a bench, or your woodpile then by all means get a small camera. If, on the other hand, you want to take action shots of naked Canadians and Pacific Northwesterners trapsing through the bush with no clothes on, the pro SLR is the only way to go.

 

[glens]

I just looked up the Nikon D100.&nbsp; It appears as though it has the same lens mount as the the 35mm SLRs.&nbsp; That would be a real boon to one who has a selection of such lenses already, and the glass is certainly adequate.&nbsp; I wish there was a digital body available for my Contax/Yashica mount lenses.&nbsp; Either that or a digital back for the RTS-II.&nbsp; I do recall seeing a product a few years ago which dropped into the camera like a 35mm cartridge system might, requiring the removal of the pressure plate.&nbsp; I wonder what's happened with that idea...

Does the D100 optically compensate for the smaller image area or are all the lenses effectively narrower angular field / longer focal length (with concomitant reduction of aperture ratio)?

One thing which really made a lasting impression on me regarding optics was several years ago when I was shopping for an automatic level.&nbsp; On a relatively dreary, overcast day, with both a 22x Nikon and a 20x Wild (now Leica) instrument set up side by side and aimed out an open shop door, the Wild glass provided such better image quality (brightness, resolution, &c.) that the choice was immediate.&nbsp; This was a case where it would have been extremely difficult to choose between the two pieces of equipment, respecting the optic quality, had the evaluations been isolated instances.&nbsp; Though one must always be aware that finished products of such nature are certainly not uniform, and with two other samples the comparative results may have been different.&nbsp; Here I go babbling again...

It's sometimes hard to explain to people that an image saved in a lossy format such as JPEG (in it's typical level of compression) will be forever limited to that quality level (and maximum size), at best.

What was the topic of this thread again?

Doug, in your opinion, has the digital camera reached a level yet where it can reasonably replace "analog" film for the discriminating connoisseur?&nbsp; I'm assuming the CCDs exhibit a short-term memory effect with extremes of light intensity.&nbsp; Is that much of a factor?

Glen

 

[dbabcock]

Yeah, I remember that I thought that that 35mm digital drop in was tossed around for a while. It actually looked like a 35mm roll with a plastic film plane attached that housed the imaging array and held it where the film would go. Another later variant has you replacing the film access door with the new digital one. I believe that first beta prototypes were somewhat compromised in more than a few areas, but can't remember what, specifically.

The D100 has a CCD size that effectively multiplies the attached lens focal length by 1.5 (as do the D1, D1X and D1H). This means that a 20mm lens in 35mm format will have the field of view of a 30mm lens when used on the digital camera. The CCD is simply smaller than a 35mm film frame. This bodes well for telephoto work, but really puts a damper on wide angle action. I have a 14mm f/2.8 rectilinear that I paid dearly for so I could get into the 20mm range that I was used to with 35mm. Aperature ratio remains fixed irregardless of which type of camera it's mounted to.

CCD's and CMOS imaging arrays are prone to "blooming" to a certain degree when presented with a bright subject suddenly, but this isn't a problem with still cameras as the time constants are very short. We're not talking about phospored screens and video AGC's here.

Lastly, I've heard that with some of the finest grain films available in 35mm (Provia F 100 at a granularity index of 9 comes to mind), you'd have to go with an array of about 20 MP to equal it in 35mm terms. This would equate to a raw file size of some 30 MB. They say the the new Canon 1D S, at 11 MP comes awfully close. It also has an array that's equal in size to a 35mm frame. Much has been done recently about noise reduction in CCD and CMOS arrays. I think that the future may be in CMOS as it's certainly nice to be able to integrate signal processing right on the array chip itself, if not the finest line process available.

 

[John in MA]

I might as well weigh in here for what little it's worth. First, what in particular don't you like about the D-370? I use a D-340R for all my eBay and quick shots, and it really isn't that bad. My printer (Hp 890c) doesn't have the color resolution to do the photos justice.

Anyway, I'd say that a "really nice" digicam's resolution is, or starts at 2.1MP. More is always better, but you may not need it unless you do lots of cropping, high res or large size printing, or do work professionally. The Nikon 995 was the first to break the 2 megapixel line. Quality in this range depends most on the expsoure control and image processing hardware and compression schemes in the camera itself, rather than sheer pixels. An expamle is the Toshiba PDR-M60 I have. A 2.1MP camera, but the photos don't look very good because of what the lousy camera does to them.

I personally think that lenses are overrated in digicams. Unless they're really crap it's just not much of a factor until you get into long (8X+) zooms. Then you want to pay attention to that aspect. BTWigital zoom features are not worth paying attention to. You can do the same work by cropping and resizing in a photo editor. Most cameras come with them--just don't make an descisions based on it.

Olympus and Sony are my picks for the best home use cameras. Minolta, Nikon, and Kodak come in on the same level but I don't have much experience with them. There are lots of others out there that are fine, too. These are just the big names with the highest quality and support. A friend of mine uses Olympus C-2100s (2.1MP, 10X zoom, NLA but about $600 used) for making poster-size printouts and it's really hard to tell them from an enlargement of a regular 35mm negative.

Now, about storage. I like SmartMedia cards or Sony memory sticks. CF cards are larger and can be damaged by dust and water. Unless you absolutly need the disk feature do NOT get a Mavica. Nothing wrong with the cameras, but the disk is a huge burden and they're colosally overpriced. I just sold a used, three year old 1.3MP FD88 for more than a new 3.1MP Sony Cybershot would cost. The cameras are also heavy, bulky, and prone to physical damage because all the drive hardware in there. The disks don't hold much are are fragile, and also physically wear out.

The first pro digital cameras were sort of done in the "drop-in" way. Fuji or Kodak would make a digital back and extension that would then be mounted to a Nikon (N8008, I think) SLR and sold as a package. They're still doing it today, also with Canons now, and then there are some that use highly-modified SLR bodies.

Boy, that's a ramble. Just buy an EOS-1D.

 

[dbabcock]

Here it is, Butch.

Love,
Beavergirl

 

[MasterBlaster]

Most excellent post bump, Doug!

 

[lostone]

Originally posted by glens
I just looked up the Nikon D100.&nbsp; It appears as though it has the same lens mount as the the 35mm SLRs.

Glen

Glen it does take the nikon mount lenses, My father in law sold me his F4 and when he picked up a D100. I had to start my own lens collection. The Fuji also takes the Nikon lenses as well and is built on the Nikon D100 body, some of the reading I have been doing on it (Fuji) is saying that it has a slight edge over the Nikon because of the software they put in instead of the Nikon version. Sorry but no I can't remember where I was reading the article on it, it has been a few months ago when I read it. You will loose a bit of the range when you change to digital, say using a 16mm lens on a film camera you will need to use a 14mm on digital to get the same area. I have a mixed bag of lenses I use both Nikon and Sigma's the Nikons are really nice but for the money it is hard to beat the Sigma's.

 

[Gypo Logger]

I found these shrooms in the woods today, ate them for supper and now I feel strange. Could it be because you're not supposed to eat anything bigger than your head?
John