I’ve been very happy with the older 70-200mm f2.8 VR telephoto zoom. Even even though the edges are softer than the center, it never bothered me. With weddings, I am mostly only interested in the center portions of the image being super-crisp. Similarly, the vignetting didn’t bother me. I usually add more vignetting in post-processing anyway.
Doing a few test shots around the house, and was immediately impressed. It is sharp! I like sharp. Every thing about this lens is good news. Focusing is faster, and flare is very well controlled. There has been considerable debate about the shortening of focal length with this lens as you focus closer and closer. Yet, I would never have noticed it if I hadn’t been told about it. For my work, a total non-issue.
One of the features of this new lens, is that it has even more aggressive vibration reduction / stabilization. So even though I do take my shutter speeds low at times, my advice is always that if you want sharp images, the first thing you need to do is make your shutter speed much faster. Now, I’ve never been one to really be able to hold my camera steady without careful control or with steadying myself against a wall. So for me, vibration reduction is an essential feature on long lenses .. especially since I don’t work with a tripod for the style of photography I do.
At a wedding on Saturday, where I was the second shooter for a friend, I was able to see how the VR worked during an actual photo shoot. During the ceremony I took photos of the guests sitting in the dark temple. How dark? 1/6 th @ f2.8 @ 2000 ISO kinda dark …
The specialty of a macro lens is in allowing you much much closer to your subject than a normal optic would .. with the ease of continuous focusing from infinity to the closest distance. No need to screw in additional rings or lenses or reverse your lens. A macro lens works as a close-up lens, and as a more usual optic. And that’s the versatility of it.
hands-on review: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS lens
I got hold of an early copy of the new Canon 100mm f2.8 macro IS lens,
courtesy of LensProToGo, the lens rental company.
The main feature of the new macro lens is that it offers stabilization. Now this might not seem such a big deal to photographers who work with a tripod and photograph more static subjects – but the moment you want to shoot on the move, and play around fluently with your composition and angles – then using the lens hand-held becomes a huge advantage.
Instead of photographing the usual macro subjects – flowers and insects – I decided to test out this new lens on a portrait session with a model, Annisa.
In the photo above, my settings were 1/200th @ f3.2 @ 400 ISO. In testing the lens with and without the IS enabled, there is a clear difference in the crispness of the (handheld) images. There’s no doubt that the IS works, and is a major improvement on the previous generation of this lens ..
In testing cameras these days, they are rated not just for specification, but for their primary qualities in helping you take great photographs. And for that, judging the camera according to handling, image quality and auto-focus speed and accuracy, becomes even more important than just the list of specs.
Nikon D5000 hands-on review
So with that in mind, when I recently got my hands on a brand-new Nikon D5000, I thought I’d hit the streets and see how it performs. I took it for a late-night stroll around Times Square in New York, armed only with a Nikon 50mm f1.4G AF-S lens to see how the camera handled the low light levels there.
Nikon D5000 image quality
And of course, late night in Times Square is when you see and even meet the interesting people, the gorgeous people and the usual mix’n'match that Manhattan throws at you. So let’s see how the 12.3 megapixel Nikon D5000 performed in low light, at high ISO settings; all hand-held, using just the light from the billboards ..
Here is Blueberry Studmuffin, posing for the camera.
1/250th F1.8 @ 1000 ISO; no flash
As you can see, the camera responds fast enough for a candid portrait in low light.
Impressive so far …
With D-SLRs having ever higher resolving power, and lenses just getting better in terms of optical quality .. and digital photography giving us the possibility of looking at images at 100% resolution, we are becoming ever more aware of slight discrepancies in focusing and sharpness. Especially so with lenses that have very wide apertures.
Quite often a camera will be within spec, and a lens be within spec in terms of their individual tolerances, but combined, they might be outside of tolerance. Or perhaps a lens wasn’t quite within spec .. but for whatever reason, we might end up with a camera and lens combination which juuuuust isn’t quite as sharp as it could be.
For example, with the one lens I recently bought, the Nikon 200mm f2 VR, I frequently felt that I could touch up the focus manually a little better than the camera had focused. And checking on the camera’s LCD screen, I could see that. From the most recent shoot where I used this lens, (which I’ve shown in earlier postings), here is an image where the lens back-focused. And it appeared to do this consistently.
[ click on the image to see a larger version ]
Now at normal web-size and even small print enlargements, you wouldn’t be able to discern that the image isn’t quite focused accurately on her nearest eye. But as soon as you go to 100%, you can see the focusing error …
A few times a year I’m fortunate enough to photograph a destination wedding, where I fly out to a more glamorous location than New Jersey. The Bahamas, Aruba, Jamaica, and even locations within the USA are choice destinations for couples who are looking to have their weddings in an exotic locale.
The choice of equipment to fly out to photograph a destination wedding, as well as the way to transport them becomes a real concern. You have to have a flexible selection of gear with you, with a certain amount of redundancy in case something goes wrong with a piece of equipment. Yet it all has to fit into a portable camera bag or case – and one that can be taken on board a plane as a carry-on bag. This really is of great importance, since if you read some news reports it would even appear as if thievery from luggage at airports are rampant.
So there is the delicate balance – a sensible choice of equipment that has to fit into a bag that is the right size for international carry-on luggage …
This is not quite so much as a review as it is a preview – I managed to get hold of a set of the new PocketWizards – the miniTT1 and FlexTT5- and got to play around with them a bit.
The first thing that is impressive about the mini TT1 and Flex TT5, is that they will do away with sync cords. That constant struggle to figure out a way to use the older PocketWizards while you have a speedlight in the camera’s hotshoe, is now a thing of the past. Both the mini TT1 and Flex TT5 units have a remarkably low profile on top of the camera’s hotshoe – and can take a speedlight.
A minor hiccup was that I first tried this with the Canon 5D mk2. After being frustrated in not being able to consistently get results from the on-camera speedlight while mounted on top of the camera-mounted miniTT1 or FlexTT5 .. I bothered to read the instructions and noted that the 5D mk2 can’t yet be used like that. Such are the problems when reverse engineering and improving existing technology. These types of incompatibilities will occur. Hopefully the PocketWizard crew will be able to sort this out in the future with a software update.
So I borrowed a friend’s Canon 5D to test the new PocketWizards out further.
One of the things that makes the new PocketWizards so interesting, is that they are designed to expand on the current wireless TTL flash technology and make it more reliable, and workable over longer ranges .. while offering you all the advantages of wireless TTL flash. One of those things would be high-speed flash sync.
1/800th @ f2 @ 100 ISO
Canon 5D; Canon 85mm f1.2 II
Where high-speed flash sync shines is in allowing us to use wide apertures for a specific look. Photographing my model, Allison, in Hoboken, I wanted the Manhattan skyline to be just a softly out-of-focus haze in the background. This meant a wide aperture like f2 on the 85mm lens. This in turn implied a shutter speed of 1/800th.
The PocketWizards were simplicity itself to use here.
Slide them into position, and switch them on. Dead simple.
But there was more to it than this …
Last year some time, after seeing another photographer’s results with the Canon 200mm f2 IS, I was curious enough to rent one, check it out, and then lust after one. I posted a write-up and some images at the time. What got to me was how insanely sharp the lens was at f2 .. and of course the incredible dream-like bokeh at f2 imparting an impressionistic appearance to the background.
With me reverting to Nikon recently, I picked up a used copy of Nikon 200mm f2 VR instead. But it’s been too cold outside to try this lens out .. until yesterday when there was a slight thaw in the temperatures. Since I really liked the results when I photographed Jackie with the Canon 200mm f2 IS, using only the lights in Times Square … I decided to meet up with a new model in Times Square last night to try out the Nikon 200mm f2 VR.
One of the features of the new Nikon SB-900 speedlight is the thermal cut-out. This feature allows the speedlight to stop firing (ie, stop working), when there is danger of it over-heating from shooting too fast. The temperature guage can clearly be seen on the right-hand side of the SB-900 LCD display.
I have to stress that this is through no fault of the equipment or the equipment manfucaturer’s design. *I* am using the speedlight outside of the recommendations. Purposely, as explained in the other posting.
With the SB-900 the Nikon engineers cleverly built in a thermal cut-out to stop someone from doing this by accident. It will let the speedlight cut out when a certain termperature is reached inside the unit. This is a good thing. It protects your speedlight from possible damage. Fortunately, the engineers also allows you to bypass this in case you do need to shoot faster than the speedlight is designed for. This is easily set via the menu on the speedlight. (One of the many plusses in favour of the SB-900 is the self-apparant menu.)
Some people don’t seem to be aware of this feature, which is strange considering they just spent $400+ on a top-of-the-range speedlight and didn’t bother to flip through the manual or figure out all the controls.
Others seem to think that this feature is a negative. They seem to think that this feature implies the SB-900 is prone to over-heating. Now, without doing destructive testing on my SB-900, I would say that I would be hugely surprised if the SB-900 is more prone to over-heating than any other speedlight, whether it be the SB-800 or any of the Canon speedlights. Having this feature does NOT make the SB-900 prone to this problem. It allows you to side-step the over-heating problem. In other words, it’s not a negative … it’s a positive, because the speedlight now warns you, and if need be, cuts out.
Therefore my take on the thermal cut-out feature of the SB-900 is that it is one of the advantages that the SB-900 has over other speedlights, and even more of an advantage that you can over-ride it. The best of both worlds.
Now, a few months of using the Nikon SB-900, I still think it is the god of all speedlights.
.
** edited to add: Dec 24, 2008
With a bit more experience now of how the SB-900 thermal protection cuts in, I do believe Nikon over-engingeered this feature, because when the SB-900 goes into thermal protection, it also disables the camera’s PC terminal!
I photographed an event this past weekend, and when the on-camera SB-900 cut out, the PC terminal of the D3 was also disabled .. and this meant that none of my off-camera flashes worked. The off-camera flashguns would’ve saved me here, but in this instance the SB-900 over-rode the D3. There really is no reason for this to be designed this way, and is an unfortunate implementation of what really is a good option to have on the speedlight.
Similarly, if the batteries of the SB-900 become depleted, the camera’s PC terminal is once again disabled. And that’s just silly.
Apathy Angel against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline.
The settings for the image above was 1/2000 @ f1.6 @ 100 ISO, and the reason for the wide aperture was that I wanted to have the skyline appear as that dreamlike haze in the background. The bright light though, forced a very fast shutter speed. In this case 1/2000th would let the background over-expose a little and blow out somewhat, but give me some detail. But to control the lighting on my model more specifically than just the available light, I used flash.
For the lighting here I used a speedlight in a Westcott Halo softbox held up on a monopod by an assistant. This would give me directional but soft light on my model, Apathy Angel.
A year ago, to trigger an off-camera flash, you would have to rely on radio transmitters (such as Pocketwizards for example), or wireless TTL control.
With the traditional radio transmitters, there is no intelligence, and the off-camera flash would be in manual .. which has worked very well over the years. A real limitation would be that you’d hit a ceiling with the maximum sync speed. This in turn would force a specific aperture on you unless you started using neutral density filters and such to give a wider aperture in bright light.
Wireless TLL, in conjunction with high sync-speed flash technology would allow you to to go much higher shutter speeds (and hence wider apertures.) This does come at the cost though of reduced power (and therefore reduced range.) One of the big problems with wireless TTL, is that you need line-of-sight to control your other speedlights. This eliminates using the speedlight in an enclosed softbox, or in a position out of sight.
In the past year there has been incredible buzz about a new product, the RadioPoppers, which would allow any speedlight and camera capable of wireless TTL flash, to be controlled even when not in the line of sight of the master speedlight or flash controller on the camera. This is a huge benefit to photographers that need a reliable way of controlling TTL flash without the hassle of staying within a specific range and direction of the slaved speedlights.
The additional benefit is that high sync-speed flash photography can also be used with much greater ease and without the need of line-of-sight control.
That’s the background. Here’s the review … do the RadioPoppers work? Yes, very well!
With the SB-900 Speedlight, Nikon’s flagship flashgun, it is clear that they did their homework. The SB-800 was a great flashgun, but there were certain things about it that were very frustrating, but the Nikon SB-900 gets all of this right.
A huge improvement is that the SB-900 rotates 180′ to either side!
Right there in this image is the main reason to get the SB-900 … it now rotates 180′ to the right, instead of stopping short at the 90′ mark like the SB-800. This is a huge benefit in bouncing flash with specific effect in mind.
That the SB-800 stopped short at the 90′ mark when you rotated the flash-head to the right, was a huge downside for me in comparing the SB-800 to the Canon 580EX. (Although there is the compromise of turning your SB-800 into an SB-850 and forcing it to rotate further to the right than just 90′)
