890 – In A City Of Monsters And Heroes And Men

 Nikon 35/1.8, Nikon 35/1.8 Review  Comments Off
Mar 222009
 



This must be a time of weird titles. Yesterday’s “Nessun Dorma” for a bicycle, today’s …

… but does it not look like a superhero, like Clark Kent about to shed his clothes, revealing Superman beneath? “No fear, I’m coming!”

Yesterday I had to work. It was a beautiful, sunny morning and I really enjoyed going to work. Sure, you don’t need sunlight for good photography, frequently the harsh contrasts are more of an annoyance, but it is incredible what a little sun can do to your soul.

When I thought to conclude my review of the Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.4G with “887 – Southern Sunset“, I said that I’d spare you the brick wall. Well, not really :)

Actually it is not so uncommon that you need an image free of distortions. Take this garage door with the graffiti. There are no vertical lines, but the horizontals don’t look good at all when they are bent. On the left you see the original from the camera, on the right the corrected version.

I finally downloaded the latest version of PTLens. It already supports this lens, and here it makes all the difference.

I have linked the left image to the full-size original, so you can download it and try it for yourself. I strongly believe that PTLens does such a good job, that you won’t be able to spot any image deterioration. Whatever else you do in Photoshop will have much more impact on quality, I’d really recommend software distortion control. It saves you a lot of money on lenses (if you’re able to get perfect lenses at all), and it is painless to apply whenever you need it.

The Song of the Day is “Of Monsters And Heroes And Men” from the new James album “Hey Ma”. YouTube has a live video.

887 – Southern Sunset

 Nikon 35/1.8, Nikon 35/1.8 Review  Comments Off
Mar 202009
 



Well, that’s not my best image, but it’s all I got from yesterday and sometimes it’s maybe more about showing up. I’ve spent a few days relaxing in the sunny south of Austria, now I’m back to Vienna and a completely different weather. You’ll see soon :)

Speaking of best images, we all know that votings on sites like Flickr, or in my case SmugMug, not necessarily reflect the real quality of our work, too much depends upon the time of day when we post, upon the pure chance that some people pick it up at roughly the same time, and whether one is a community builder or not, but for what it’s worth, I’d like to mention that since today “885 – The Beauty Of The Days Gone By” is my most popular image on SmugMug.

In the meantime the first reviews of the new Nikon AF-S 35/1.8G have come up, Photozone.de has a very technical one, thus I’ll spare you the brick wall :)

Yes, this lens has quite high barrel distortions. This may disappoint some, but again can’t trouble me much. As of this day, the lens is already supported by PTLens, and I’m sure that DxO Optics Pro will follow soon. Apart from that, even the simple correction in Photoshop will suffice for most applications. For images like today’s, correcting distortions is pointless anyway.

As to the quality loss due to software correction of distortions, well, there sure must be some loss, but current software algorithms are good enough to make it unrecognizable. I wouldn’t worry about it.

The review at Photozone mentions it and it was one of my first impressions, this may be fast glass, but the autofocus is far from fast and snappy. It works pretty well and accurate though. As to speed, I have tried tracking bicyclists on the road, and I had no problems at all. This sure ain’t no birding lens, but on the other hand, when you go birding with a 35mm, there’s either something wrong with you or the birds a damn big, and then they may as well be slow :)

Longitudinal CA are pretty high as well, but that’s normal for fast lenses. Even price and weight monsters like the Canon 50/1.2L suffer badly from them and, more in my price range, my beloved Sigma 50/1.4 has them as well. Didn’t take me from making good use of it.

Any final verdict, you ask? Well, this would be a fine standard lens at a higher price, and at around €200 it is a fantastic bargain. It has its share of weaknesses, but it is light and exceptionally sharp. If you are a Nikon DX format shooter, you can’t do wrong getting one.

The Song of the Day is “When The Sun Sets Down South (Southern Sunset)”by Sidney Bechet. I have it on disc 21 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive” and Amazon has it for download on “Classic Sides 1937-1939″ as well, though they don’t have that album on CD. This is the second time that I use this song, the first time was in “685 – When The Sun Sets“.

886 – True Colors

 Nikon 35/1.8, Nikon 35/1.8 Review  Comments Off
Mar 182009
 



Welcome to the third part of my review of the Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G. The first part was about sharpness, the second part about bokeh, and today we will look into chromatic aberrations, an optical phenomenon often referred to under the abbreviation CA.

I really don’t want to explain over and again what has been explained so often. For more detailed explanations of chromatic aberrations see articles by Paul van Walree, Ken Rockwell or Cliff Smith, to only name a few.

Fact is, they come in four flavors, the combinations of the pairs primary/secondary, and longitudinal/lateral. Primary CA (red/blue fringes) is corrected in modern lenses, all that remains is secondary CA (green/magenta fringes). Longitudinal means that different wavelengths focus on different planes. That cannot be corrected in software. Lateral can, because with lateral chromatic aberrations all wavelengths focus on the same plane, but they produce differently sized images. The software trick is, to scale the red, green and blue channel until the images have the exact same sizes. That’s what you do in software when you correct secondary lateral CA.

Some new Nikon DSLRs automatically correct CA in-camera, at least for JPEGs. Nikon introduced the feature with the D3/D300, and as far as I know, all new cameras since, the D700, D90 and D3X have it as well. Correction for CA in Nikon cameras works extremely well and whenever I have cared to look closely at a JPEG, it was flawless. Whenever I have tried to do better in Adobe Camera RAW, I have failed. Up to now, that is.

And here comes a surprising point: Nikon does not base CA removal on anything the camera is told by the lens, not even for their own lenses. CA removal is totally based on image analysis. How do I know? Because I caught them failing miserably.

On the left side you see a JPEG straight from the camera. The bark of the tree has extreme detail, and somehow the correction algorithm seems to struggle. The right side is the same image, converted from RAW in Adobe Camera RAW.
I can’t remember the exact settings that I used, but it was quite extreme. The two crops are from the lower left corner, and you can see how much of a difference it makes. You can almost see it in the thumbnails.

Obviously this lens suffers badly from secondary lateral CA. That’s certainly a problem, but none that I’d call too severe. If you’re shooting JPEG only, you could get unlucky and trigger a case where the built-in correction fails (and that is extremely rare) or you may shoot with a camera that has no built-in correction at all. If you shoot RAW, you have to correct it, but you can.

The fact that a single camera, my Nikon D300, with a single lens, my 35/1.8, corrects for CA at one time and not at another, is proof for me that this correction is based upon image analysis only. Most of the time it works flawless, sometimes it fails, and this may be due to certain patterns in the image.

The other interesting thing is, that lateral CA is not independent of focusing distance. The image of the bark was focused very near, and I had to use other correction values than for images focused to infinity. When you remember the illustrations in Paul van Walree‘s article, this really makes sense, but for some reason I had not expected it.

I had frequently used “Previous Conversion” settings in Adobe Camera RAW when converting more than one image. This is wrong. Don’t do it, or at least only do it, when you convert images that were focused to approximately the same distance.

Now, couldn’t I be wrong about Nikon’s correction method? Could the correction generally fail at close focus?

Not at all. The Image of the Day was shot from about the same distance, and the JPEG from the camera is perfectly clean of CA, just as the conversion from RAW. QED.

Well, here we are with some lessons learned: This lens has substantial CA, but that’s something you can fix in post-processing. Some cameras do it automatically for JPEG shooters, but they don’t do it all of the time. Lateral CA varies with focusing distance, thus you better do it manually and don’t rely on remembered settings.

The Song of the Day is “True Colors” from Cyndi Lauper’s 2005 album “The Body Acoustic”. YouTube has the video.

885 – The Beauty Of The Days Gone By

 Nikon 35/1.8, Nikon 35/1.8 Review  2 Responses »
Mar 172009
 



Here we are at the second part of my little review of the new Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G. Yesterday in the first part we have looked into sharpness, and there was certainly nothing to complain about.

The Image of the Day is actually one more exercise in sharpness. I have converted it with Adobe Camera RAW and then done my usual B&W treatment of lately. Don’t let the image fool you, there is no corner softness and no vignetting in the original, that was all made in Photoshop :)

For today I have promised to look into bokeh. We have already seen some in my night shot “880 – This Sad Burlesque“, that was wide open and with near point light sources, something where most lenses look good, but today it is a more interesting subject, a criss-cross of twigs, photographed at f1.8, f2.8, f4 and f8.

The thumbnails link to full-size images, so you better click on them. The last, f8, was taken at high ISO. I used Auto-ISO at a lower speed limit of 1/200s. Those little things move incredibly fast in the slightest wind, and I really wanted to get the sharp parts without motion blur.

Looks good to me. The Sigma 50/1.4 performs still better, but I can’t call this bokeh unpleasant. Not at all. On a scale from one to five with five best, I would call this a solid four.

Sharpness OK, bokeh fine, I guess we should look into CA tomorrow, shall we?

The Song of the Day is “The Beauty Of The Days Gone By” from Van Morrison’s 2002 album “Down the Road”. I didn’t find a video, but Deezer has it from some three CD collection “Still on Top: The Greatest Hits”. It’s track 12 on the third disk.

884 – Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby

 Nikon 35/1.8, Nikon 35/1.8 Review  1 Response »
Mar 152009
 



The Image of the Day is actually from yesterday. I shot it in Carinthia, in the valley called Gailtal, on the road between Nötsch and Hermagor, before crossing over to Italy. This is a part of Carinthia that consistently has much snow in winter. This is just where humid air from the Mediterranean laps over the first range of mountains and hits alpine cold. The result is heavy precipitation, and this winter that meant two meters of snow in the upper part of the valley. I really liked the melting patterns on what is still left.

But now let’s get to something completely different. I promised you kind of a review of the new Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G, and I have already hinted at the quality of this lens. Now is the time to show some hard facts. The following images were all shot this afternoon out of the window of my study.

The first image is the original JPEG, taken at f1.8, focused on the group of people.

All these thumbnails link to 100% crops, thus in order to distinguish anything, I beg you to click the images. That will open the original size in a new window. Now let’s have a look at the details. The first question is, shall we look at JPEGs from the camera, or better at images from a RAW conversion?

On the left side you see the original JPEG from the camera, on the right a conversion with Adobe Camera RAW, with a little sharpening added. There is not much of a difference, but the image from RAW has a tad more detail. Thus all other 100% crops will be from RAW.
While the image at f1.8 is already sharp, we gain some micro-contrast when stopping down, but I honestly don’t see much of a difference beyond f2.5.
This is good, really good. Thus the answer to the all important question, the one that is invaribly asked first, “But, is it sharp?”, can only be a resounding YES! Yes, this lens is sharp.

As you could see in the full image, there is some vignetting wide open, but it is neither very strong, nor does it pose any problem in post-production. It goes away when you stop down and is completely gone at around f4.

Center sharpness is one thing, but what about the corners? Well, let’s look at that.

In order to test it, I have focused with the center focus point on the yellow/red advertising sign of the hardware store that you see in the left lower corner, then recomposed. I have taken only two images this time, one at f1.8 and one at f8.
This time I have equalized the two crops with a levels adjustment, in order to eliminate the influence of the vignette at f1.8. The result is reassuring. Of course f1.8 is worse than f8, but the difference is not much greater than it was in the center. Thus I’d say the corners are OK as well.

This concludes part one of my review of the Nikon AF-S DX 35/1.8G. So far that’s not bad for a $200 lens. Tomorrow we will look at bokeh.

The Song of the Day is “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” from Anita O’Day’s 1963 album “Once Upon a Summertime”. Hear it on YouTube.