D3 speed. Size, weight, quality.

Video of Nikon D3 first impressions. Man, that's a friggin fast camera, both shooting and ISO-wise.

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"Already ordered one?"

No. I might afford it, but hardly justify it at my use level.
Also, it is simply too big and heavy. Very conspicuous, and I'm a walk-around photographer, I don't like heavy.

For a hard working photographer like for example my pal Laurie Jeffery, speed, reliability, features, and ruggedness are much more important that weight and size, up to a point of course.

For an amateur art photographer like me who likes to walk around and be inspired, and not advertise too widely that he is photographing and not to get tilted shoulders, weight and size are quite important. That's why I might get the upcoming Fuji F50fd, and why I keep hoping for more compact and light cameras in professional quality in the future.

It is also why I am looking much forward to either Canon or Nikon making the next camera with a full frame sensor (low noise in pictures), but compact. The next-gen Canon 5D, as it were. My Canon 5D makes totally awesome quality, much better than I ever could with 35mm, so I can only try to imagine what the next step is.


"Canon went for quantity of pixels, whereas Nikon invested in quality of pixels"

Well, Canon did the same with the 1D III. As opposed to the 1Ds III. (Notice the little "s". Stupid naming convention.)

It is anybody's guess if Nikon will make a super-high rez camera too. I think they will though. I think they removed the "H" from the speed camera because it's no longer really a low rez option. 12MP is good enough for almost anything. 22MP is a replacement for big 6x7 studio cameras, maybe even 4x5 inches.

Laurie Jeffery says:
This looks like my kind of camera. It's about time Nikon did this.
I shall be getting one.
Anybody want a very well looked after but much used D2X that only been around the world three times and only ever shot nudes?

Zorki-4

Rangefinder camera, Russian Zorki-4, which I bought on eBay. I really wanted this one, I would have paid four times as much, I just think it's beautiful. The snakeskin is new, not from factory.
I got the F:1.5 lens for it, I love the look of the big glass of a fast lens. (Of course a Russian 1.5 lens from the sixties is probably as sharp as a mashmallow and has no anti-reflex coating, but no matter.)

Dominos

I just got a menu from Dominos Pizza in my mail box. I didn't know we had Dominos here.
Most local pizzarias here charge about five to seven pounds for a 12-inch pizza. Not cheap, I think. (Currently a pound is two dollars.)
Dominos charge around four pounds more.
That is absolutely obscene. I wonder how they get away with it.
Especially since people here in Northern UK are pretty ch... economical. A friend of mine had two cafes, one was a nice one with what I thought was reasonable prices, you could get a nice meal for seven pounds. That one never made a profit. The other one was a super-bargain lunch cafe. That one was busy-busy-busy.
So how does Dominos get away with charging eleven pounds for a pizza? (Call it 20 dollars.)

Morninglight II

Two more from this morning.



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Oh, and one more example of contrast which cameras can't handle (yet):


Here's something I've observed: too high contrast is aesthetically acceptable (to me anyway) if the affected areas are small and non-essential, as on the top two pictures. If the areas are important, like the tree trunk and grass on the third picture, the effect is ugly.

Image reformatting

Here's something else I did not see coming: "seam carving" for image resizing.
It is making a picture narrower or broader without distorting it, and thus changing the scene which was photographed.

I find it interesting that Mike Johnston (The Online Photographer) hates it. It seems he considers the subject to be holy and sacrosanct, and the subject to be what photography is all about. And he has talked about how digital photography is not really photography, because it is way too easy to change an image.

I dunno. How holy is "reality"? Does it even exist?

Film vs digital

I went over to digital cameras in 1998, and have never looked back, even though my first camera had just dreadful* image quality compared to film. The speed and flexibility was just too seducing.
But in case you're interested, here's an article comparing film and digital.

*The resolution of the Nikon Coolpix 600 was not even one megapixel (it was 768x1024), and even viewed at that size the noise and lack of sharpness was not even as good as the old 110 Instamatic cameras, or a Polaroid picture. But back then it was new and amazing.
The linked gallery is also a bite of history. I lived in Edinburgh in 2000 in a sublet apartment. I did all my work, including image processing and so on, on an Apple laptop. A simple life, and new and exciting.

I later got a Nikon 950, 2MP and a big step up, and a Canon Ixus, also 2MP, very compact and very good.

Contrast (and noise)

Talking about contrast, here is a picture I made as an experiment a couple of years ago. (Note this was done for science, not art! The car is not so fascinating.:)

I took these three pictures and assembled them in photoshop to get the dynamic range.
Now you can do it automatically, but you need to take the pics on a tripod so the camera does not move and particularly don't rotate between images.




Assembled image:

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Oh, and apropos to today's discussion of the new Nikon cameras: the 100% crop (click on it) below shows how huge a leap Nikon has just taken in high-ISO perfermance. The picture was taken at 800 ISO with the Nikon D2x. Look at all that noise! The Canon 5D is noise free at that speed. And the Canon 1D III is better than that. And supposedly the Nikon D3 is even better than that. Imagingresource.com describes big prints from 6400 ISO which look really good. Quite amazing.

Morning Light

Believe it or not, this is the side of the skip on the truck seen above:



Friday morning before 7 am. Nikon D40, Nikkor 18-200mm with image stabilization.

BTW, this trip demonstrates my main remaining gripe: dynamic range. I took many images I was exited about but which simple fell flat because the contrast exceeded what the camera could handle.
Apparently, Nikon, like Canon, has addressed this issue with software in the camera in the upcoming models, let's see how that goes. I doubt it will be as dramatic an improvement as I could wish for.
Look at the picture below: admittedly an extreme subject, but the eye can handle it, so I think we should aim for cameras to also be able to handle it one day, with detail both in shadows and highlights.

Watch cameras

How to choose a camera or a watch.

William Gibson is a watch collector too, and features this interest in his wonderful book All Tomorrow's Parties.

The Nikon Empire Strikes Back

OK, this surprised me: Nikon hits back hard. (And another article here.) Including the full frame DSLR that high end customers have been begging for since the millennium at least. And beautiful it is too, both the design and the features.

One of the most interesting features, especially in the flagship D3, is very high ISO capability. (For low light shooting without too much noise in the images.) This was arguably the point where Nikon was lagging most behind Canon. And Canon increased that gap recently, but now it appears that Nikon has leap-frogged even that big difference and come well ahead. If the cameras live up to this in practice, this is hugely impressive.

Now the top end race has two contenders, gotta love that. If Sony also joins the fray at that level when their pro models arrive, the competition will be stiff. Good for the rest of us.

OK, me, I would better like a less bulky full frame camera a la Canon 5D, but still. It will surely arrive from Canon, and maybe even from Nikon in the fullness of time.

Thom writes about the D300: "... take a D200, which is a very nice handling camera, and stuff some key new components into it and you have something that's as fast as a D2x, has as many pixels as a D2x, has a better focus system than a D2x, writes to cards faster than a D2x, has cleaner high ISO results than a D2x, and, oh yes, sells for US$3200 less (at list prices, at street prices the difference is hundreds of dollars less). What's not to like about that?"

Well said. Viewed like that one can see what remarkable progress is made.

David Pogue wish list

David Pogue wish list.

Geeks and humanitarianism

I have long been a proponent of thinking in numbers, even in humanitarianism, so I was pleased to find this article.

You might remember, for instance, my earlier posts about the wrongness of "heroes" of film and literature being "heroic" by giving in to the villain because he threatened the life of one person, despite that it would endanger thousands of people.