Part 2: So cp, how's that new lens working out so far?

[kv0925]

Pretty awesome, thanks for asking! :)

I feel like I didn't use it as much as I would have liked this weekend--as mentioned in my weekend update, we didn't do as much as we might have, and Sunday was mainly working around the house, so no photos in there. But I got a few, so consider this both a weekend photo recap and a lens review. :)


This is the set of railroad tracks that carried shuttle parts and probably rocket fuel out to the Kennedy Space Center--so it's not used very much these days. The Hammock Trail paths cross the tracks, and I figured the girls would have fun walking along the rails and checking out the rocks of the track bed. Yep.



9-blade aperture on this lens, so the bokeh seems nice and smooth. I haven't done any critical or scientific sharpness tests, but it's definitely sharper than my old Tamron 28-75mm it's replacing. Not as sharp as my Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS, methinks. But that thing is hella sharp so it's almost not a fair comparison.


Good resistance to chromatic aberrations, I didn't correct for that at all here. I wanted to check its resistance or propensity to flare when shooting into the sun, but didn't get a good chance for that.




Our friend Holly's daughter, Aly. Nice and sharp!


Last night at Crane's Roost. We got there right at sunset, so I tried to get the sun right between them for that hair glow effect. The sun was probably already too low to cause flare, but there's no evidence of it here.


Amy's look here just cracks me up.


One more. :)


There was also a blimp going by overhead when we got there, which was kinda cool!


And a little more bokeh.


Okay, here's where I was really impressed. In DPReview's look at this lens, when testing the VC functionality they reported the (to me) incredible result of usable handheld shots at a full 1-second exposure at 24mm. That's crazy talk. I have fairly steady hands and can typically handhold down to around 1/15s at wide-to-normal focal lengths with decent results--anything less than that is definitely dicey. So the idea of shooting handheld at as much as a second sort of blew my mind, and I had to try it. I took a handful, and this was the best one--and it's not at all bad. If you look at it closely, there's a tiny bit of motion blur, but at this size it looks pretty good. One second! It's a whole new world! :) So I had some fun playing with longish exposures, all handheld:


By this time it was pretty much full-on dark. This shot is 0.8sec at 70mm and f/5.6. Also cropped in pretty heavily, 70mm isn't long enough for the distance at which a heron like this will spook and take off. :)


0.5sec, 24mm and f/5.6.


0.4sec, 70mm and f/2.8.

There's still more to test, but so far I like it a lot, and I got used to the extra weight and differences in operation fairly quickly. I kinda like that the zoom ring is stiff, it makes the zoom lock basically unnecessary, unless it loosens up with time.

Comments

[girlguitarist.livejournal.com]

This looks great! Even with web sized images I can tell this lens is better than the mark 1 Canon version. :)

Plus your pictures here are awesome :)

[cp.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I thought this was a hit-and-miss batch, but I was still getting the hang of the lens, that's my excuse. :) I love it, though--the VC alone is worth the price of admission, I think, but it seems like a really solid performer. I didn't mention the autofocus performance, but it seemed really good. Quick and very quiet, and it didn't seem to have any trouble finding focus even when it got dark last night. Very happy with it!

[girlspell.livejournal.com]

The photos are very sharp! Colors are great too. Amy makes wonderful expressions, and it' clever of you to find them.

[cp.livejournal.com]

The lens seems like a very good choice so far. I'm looking forward to my first paid gig with it so it can start paying itself off! :) Amy's quite a character, we may have our hands full with that one!

[nick-101.livejournal.com]

I like the photo quality there. Great pics, too.

[cp.livejournal.com]

Thank you sir!

[re-vised.livejournal.com]

The lens seems to be working out nicely. I like how the shots at night came out.

[cp.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I was a bit astounded when I read that review, and even moreso when I pretty much duplicated the results. I'd never even considered handholding exposures that long before!

[re-vised.livejournal.com]

I don't think my hands would be steady enough for that long!

[fiberguyr1.livejournal.com]

For the photo illiterate, can you explain why you would want to do the long exposure?

[cp.livejournal.com]

That's one of several uses! See my reply to fiberguy. :)

[cp.livejournal.com]

There are a few situations where longer exposures are useful. The primary one is low-light situations, as was the case for several of these attempts. You can only open the aperture so far, of course, and cranking up the ISO to get a fast shutter speed also only goes so far before the sensor noise introduced becomes unacceptable. So below a certain light level, long exposure is really the only option, and even prior to that point it's sometimes desirable since it lends a neat effect to nighttime images, especially when there are city lights, stars, nighttime clouds, and/or water involved. Or moving vehicles at night, I love headlight/taillight trails:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rain0975/6996271119/)
(That one is from Indianapolis a few years back, a 20-second exposure. Traffic was lighter than I'd have liked, but I still think it's cool.)

Speaking of water, long exposures have an amazing effect on moving water. When you see shots of piers where the water looks like a soft white fluff, or waterfalls and streams where the water looks like a smooth white sheet--those are long exposures. Like so, which is actually only a 0.2-second exposure:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rain0975/8981319803/)

This a full second:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rain0975/8986673780/)

And lastly, I don't really have a good example of this in my own work, but long exposures can also be used to remove people from scenic shots. Usually in a street scene, for example, the people are generally in motion, so if you can get a nice long exposure, they'll move through the frame quickly enough that they don't register on the image, or do so as a blur. Actually, I do have an example of that which I think is pretty nifty:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/rain0975/6178196108/)
That's a 10-second exposure; to fully remove the people I'd have needed probably 30 seconds or more, which would definitely require a tripod. :) But in this case the ghostly effect works well, especially given the setting!

[fiberguyr1.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That definitely helped me out.

[cp.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much! The general setup with the older girls walking the rails holding Amy's hands in the middle was my idea, but they took it from there. I didn't even realize the geometry at the time, but once I looked at it on the computer I think it's neat how the rails and trees form an X with Amy's head in the center. Makes for a neat composition, if I do say so myself. :)

My photography really only took off when I got into post-processing. That's what takes a decent image and makes it really pop, I think. Pretty much nothing I post is straight out of the camera, I always go through Lightroom and apply tweaks--sometimes subtle, sometimes not so much. :) But there are always details I want to enhance, or distractions I want to remove. I think of my style and goal as a sort of enhanced reality--I love natural, candid images, but amped up just a bit somehow.

I think a lot of what you pay for in higher-end photographic equipment is for the gear to get out of your way, if that makes sense. Higher-end camera bodies add more manual controls and dedicated info displays to make it easier to tweak things on the fly, and the automatic functions like focusing and metering are better, so you don't have to second-guess and fiddle with navigating menus so much. Better lenses are sharper and more adaptable to a wider range of situations and add things like stabilization, so you don't run into their limitations so quickly and can get a better ratio of 'keeper' shots. There's definitely a price tag associated with all that, but it's nice to know I can grab my gear and be able to handle just about any photographic situation, you know?

That said, I wouldn't feel too bad about the S3. It was a very good camera for its day, and still is quite decent. You could get a lot more camera for the money these days, sure, but the same can be said for any electronic device, right? Seems like you have an interest for sure, I hope you can explore that further with the S3 now and something better later on! In the meantime, get The GIMP (if you're not familiar, it's a FOSS Photoshop, basically) if Biscuit can handle it, and learn some post-processing basics. It really does make a world of difference to the final images!

[cp.livejournal.com]

There are purists who argue that you should try to get it all perfect in-camera, right when the shot is taken. Heck, I used to be one of those people. And I still think there's nothing wrong with trying to get the shot as good as you can right when you press the shutter, of course. But consider this: even the venerable Ansel Adams spent far more time in his darkroom than he did shooting images, tweaking his prints to make them what he envisioned when he clicked the shutter. There's no difference in the principle today, it's just that we have digital tools where he had only analog. I often wonder what he might have produced if he'd had today's equipment and computers. :)

As for me, like I said, my goal is to enhance reality. I'll crop or clone out distractions when I can, like a sign in the background or an electrical outlet or something that tends to draw the eye without adding to the image. And temporary facial blemishes like pimples, of course. :) But I've never been one to do major manipulation like changing body shapes or compositing a person into a different setting. There's a line between enhancing reality and changing it completely, after all. :)

Yes, increasing the ISO setting is basically just amplifying the signal coming off of the sensor--and much like audio, as you amplify the signal, you also amplify the underlying noise, which is what shows up as grain in digital images. Some of that can be dealt with in post-processing too, but also at a cost, specifically a reduction in detail. Even on my current camera, I try to avoid ISO settings above 1600 or so--I'll go higher if it means the difference between a noisy image or no image at all, but it's rare. On my older cameras I usually draw the line at 800 and try to stay at 400 or below when possible.

Flash is another topic, really--though an important one! The problem with on-camera direct flash, as you've probably seen, is that it tends to wash out colors and gives a bit of an artificial look. The trick with flash is to blend it with ambient light, and/or bounce it off of large surfaces (the ceiling, for example) to better spread the light for a softer and more natural look. But that's tough to do with built-in flashes that only point forward. Some people use a sheet of craft foam to deflect the light from the flash--it's kludgy but it can work. :)

I've not used GIMP myself, and I'm actually not even particularly skillful with Photoshop. I know they do a lot of the same stuff, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. :) Lightroom is in the Photoshop family but very different--it combines an image library catalog (which allows for importing, organizing, keyword tagging, rating, etc.) with an image editor. The editor isn't as robust as Photoshop, mainly in that it doesn't allow for layers and real pixel-level manipulation. But it does everything I need to do in terms of tweaking color, contrast, tone curves, saturation, that sort of thing, and it has local adjustment and spot healing/cloning tools for removing those imperfections I mentioned. I presume GIMP has those basics well covered, though, it's just a matter of finding them. :) I happened to find this basics tutorial on YouTube, the first few minutes I've watched look useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcIPME9X_r4

[loxthebox.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm actually there looking over the water, very cool!

[cp.livejournal.com]

I think the goal of scenic photography is to make you feel like you're there--or at least want to be there. So thanks! :)

[mspeacockwi.livejournal.com]

so very cool! I enjoy seeing your pictures so much!

[cp.livejournal.com]

Thanks! More to come! :)