This is an image of yesterday evening. It’s 17mm, ISO 2000, f4 and 1/15s. I’ve used Noise Ninja against the noise and Topaz Detail to accentuate local contrast, mostly in the foreground.

Other than that I have made a change to my buying habits that was long due. My last three music purchases were digital downloads. Funnily enough this came totally by chance. While I installed software on my laptop (the one that I just use while being on the train to Carinthia), I wanted to download the latest version of JetAudio. JetAudio is the proprietary music player of Cowon, the company that produces the excellent iAudio players. I own one of them, because Cowon is one of the few companies who care to support the free OGG music format, and because I have originally started to rip my CDs to OGG, I currently have about 30.000 tracks in this format. OGG was originally superior to MP3, and it is a format designed and implemented as open source. Unfortunately Apple obstinately refused to support the format in their players. Well, so did I buying their hardware. I even filed a bug report and wrote them one or two mails, but of course I got no reply and nothing has changed.

Anyway. JetAudio was my preferred software player so far. It’s pretty OK but nothing special. Think of WinAmp or similar programs. Now, as I installed software recently, the download server for JetAudio was unbearably slow, so I decided to look for an alternative. I found Songbird, a Mozilla-based iTunes look-alike with similar functionality and all the usual Mozilla features like plugins and skins. I had looked into it at least two years ago, then it had not really impressed me, but in the time since it has really grown up.

Well, here I was with a new player, and like iTunes is linked to the iTunes store, Songbird has plugins for music stores. Here in Austria it offers integration with 7digital, a UK-based service and of course Jamendo.com and Magnatune.com. Integration of Jamendo does not even need a plugin, and in fact I currently hear the album “The Green Waltz” by “The Dada Weatherman“, an album released under Creative Commons, an album that I have downloaded from Jamendo for free. For 10€ I could also buy the album in WMV format, i.e. uncompressed full CD quality. I have no idea how many people do that, but I seriously consider it. It’s excellent music.

The three purchases from 7digital were Ella’s “Twelve Nights in Hollywood”, on CD available at around 50€, as 320kBit MP3 offered for about half of it, a Greatest Hits compilation by Blondie and the debut album of Melody Gardot. Well, it looks like my plastic buying times are over

Regardless of the music that I’ve talked about so far, the Song of the Day is “Twisted“. Not the Annie Ross classic that we had in “578 – Twisted“, not Joni Mitchell’s respectable version from “Court and Spark”, but instead the completely unrelated song from Annie Lennox’ 2003 album “Bare”. Hear it on YouTube.

I’m on the train to Carinthia. It’s been a little complicated, the train was shorter than expected, I stood on the wrong end and had to go through the seven cars, all through to the front, but now all is well. I sit in the only car with electric current, in the right place at the window to have space for the mouse, I can work and I have an internet connection. The place was marked as reserved, so although hundreds of people must have walked by, nobody sat down. I found out though that the reservation was for the other direction, Villach to Vienna. A lot of luck, I’d say

I saw this bicycle yesterday when I left work. It looks like the bikes that those foreign, underpaid people use, who deliver our newspapers since the privatization of postal services. I have no idea why someone has sprayed “Vienna” on it, but it’s always nice to know where you are

The Song of the Day is “Vienna” from Billy Joel’s 1977 album “The Stranger”. 1977?? Oh dear, I’m growing old. Hear it on YouTube.

Welcome to the next installment of my review of the new Tamron SP AF 17-50mm 2.8 XR Di II VC LD Asp IF. Today I look into the “VC” part and talk about the consequences of having a stabilized lens in that focal range.

This lens is not meant for full-frame (FX) cameras. On my Nikon D300 it is equivalent to 25.5-75mm, that’s roughly the same as the familiar 24-70/2.8 on FX. Canon covers both ranges with stabilized lenses, Nikon covers them as well, but without stabilization. The Nikon AF-S DX 17-55/2.8 is generally regarded as a fine lens, though slightly overpriced, and the Nikon AF-S 24-70/2.8 G, the new version that was introduced along with the D3, is frequently touted the best 24-70 on the planet, even though it is not stabilized. This is the field where the new Tamron tries to compete.

We have already seen quite satisfiable optical qualities. I don’t have any of the Canon lenses to compare, I have neither of the two Nikon lenses and no Nikon FX body to use the Nikon 24-70 as it was meant to be used, thus I have a hard time putting this new Tamron into reference. From what I’ve seen so far, and from images taken with the Nikon 17-55 that I’ve seen online, I suppose that the Nikon is better as regards corner sharpness wide open, and certainly as regards distortions. The distortions on the Tamron are more complex, of the mustache type, and therefore not completely correctable in Photoshop, although specialized applications like PTLens can do it, once they support the lens. Again, from what I’ve heard, the Tamron is clearly no match for the Nikon 24-70 on an FX camera.

That is all well. The Nikon 17-55 costs twice as much, the Nikon 24-70 even almost three times. They are well supposed to be better, and as is so often the case, you don’t get twice the performance for twice the money. The question is, how does Vibration Control, Tamron’s term for what Canon calls Image Stabilization and Nikon calls Vibration Reduction, change the overall verdict?

We have to look into two questions: The first is, does it work? The answer is a resounding YES. It works, and I’d say it works at least as well as Nikon’s VR, maybe even a little better, but that may be my subjective impression, founded in nothing but my satisfaction with the present purchase.

Take this completely mundane image of bicycles standing in a dark, hardly lit street. This is not even completely sharp, and what do I mean by dark, hardly lit?

Well, just take a look at the technical data. Btw, you can do that yourself. All the images on my new blog have intact EXIF data. Firefox does not show it, of course Internet Explorer doesn’t either, and while some browsers like Opera do so, you can always save the image and open it in Photoshop or any other image processing program.

Enough of that. This image was taken at ISO 3200, f2.8 and 1/2s. Handheld. Sure, it is not completely sharp, I could have very likely got a better result out of a burst (hehe, a “burst” at 1/2s ) of three or five images, and maybe even trying one more time would have sufficed. This is just a single, first, half-hearted attempt – and it is pretty enough for web use. I wouldn’t print this big (especially not this), but for documentary purposes even this image is OK. Or maybe not, because in reality it was so much darker, that this is rather forensic research than a documentary image

So, this is the horizon. Obviously it works and it works well. So far I have taken images at 1/8s and 50mm. I can’t hold this all of the time, but maybe every other time. 1/15s is what I have set as limit before the camera automatically raises ISO. That’s what I feel confident to be able to hold almost always at 50mm and always at 17mm.

The other question is: Do we need stabilization in such a wide lens? In general the answer to that question depends on who you ask. Nikon users tend to deny it, everybody else tends to acknowledge it. Basically: if you can have it, you want it, if you can’t, you pretend you don’t. There are exceptions, but go to any camera forum, ask the question, I bet it’s mostly along these lines.

Now that Nikon users can have it as well, how is it really? Is it worth the premium? The stabilized version of this lens costs almost twice as much as the non-stabilized.

As so often, it depends. For instance on what you photograph and when and how you do it. Stabilization is useless for sports. You want to photograph players, not moving ghosts. It is a mixed situation in the wedding market, stabilization may work well during the ceremony within a dark church (that’s exactly where you need it most), it won’t work for dancing couples. But then, you can always turn it off.

Some landscape photographers work principally from the tripod. Obviously stabilization is wasted on them. For my own uses, photographing on the street, always without tripod, not caring about motion blur, to the contrary, using it as an artistic opportunity, for me image stabilization is tremendous progress. So far I had it only on the Nikon 18-200 VR and on the Nikon 70-300 VR, direly needing it in the long focal ranges, now I have it in this very useful range on a constant f2.8 zoom and I am exalted.

Would I change to a D3s and the non-stabilized Nikon 24-70? Sure! Now that the D3s has sensor cleaning like every other DSLR on the planet (with the exception of the D3X, but that’s only a cheap one, isn’t it?), I would gladly take the superior sensor and give up stabilization, at least if I had the money to burn.

Would I exchange lenses with someone offering me the twice as expensive and optically slightly better Nikon 17-55? Never!!!

That’s it for stabilization so far. I probably should look into the question of panning, because this lens does not have two different stabilization modes like the Nikon lenses do, one for panning, one for total stabilization. Maybe with this lens VC must be turned off in order for panning to work, but maybe Tamron applies some magic and this is not necessary. I’ll have to try to find out.

As regards the images, the Image of the Day was taken at f2.8, ISO 3200, -0.7EV and 1/10s. I have removed a car in the background and the white license plate

The image with the street corner is straight from the camera. f2.8, ISO 1400, -0.7EV and 1/15s.

The Song of the Day is “Rock Steady” from the 2007 Aretha Franklin compilation “Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen of Soul”. See her live on YouTube.

It was about time to post this entry. A month ago I got an email from a young man from New York City that read

Hi Andreas, somebody sent me a link to your photo blog awhile back and I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy it almost daily from New York. Your pictures are wonderful and that countryside there is stunning! I would like to share my new record with you as thanks for sharing your photos with me, if you leave an address. Thanks Andreas, Clarence Bucaro

Well, how often do I get fan mail from someone I own records of? I was pretty overwhelmed, checked the mail again, but no, it seemed authentic.

Reply with my address, that’s what I did, and really, a week later a package from New York arrived with Clarence’s new record “‘Til Spring”, due to be available from March 3, 2009. Now you see why it was about time for this entry

It’s a pretty fantastic record, and that’s not only due to the music, it’s most of all due to Clarence’s warm voice, a voice that catches you and makes you want to hear more. The New York Times describes his music as “warm songs that hark back to late seventies Van Morrison“. Not at all bad, is it? And when I hear to it, there is always something very like Dylan’s mid-seventies “Desire”, and that’s not bad either

You can hear long excerpts from his new album right on Clarence’s site and you can pre-order the album at Amazon.com. Now tell me: can this guy sing? I really look forward to more of his music and to where he will develop.

It took me some time to come up with an image that I could honestly match with these songs. I mean, this guy’s so damn’ positive, I needed something beautiful and warm, not the slush and the rain and the gloom of the last weeks.

When I went back home on Wednesday evening, I went a way that I rarely take now, through a passage between Lerchenfelder Straße and Neustiftgasse. This passage was renovated a few years ago, with a café, an art gallery and a restaurant on each side, but it has never lost its southern charm. In fact, it always reminds me of Italy, and that’s another good reason to post the image here, because when I asked Clarence about the origins of his name, he told me his grandparents were from Sicily, Italy. Clarence, this one’s for you.

Technically, this is an image shot with the Nikon 24/2.8 at ISO 3200, f4 and 1/2s. Handheld. I used DxO as a RAW converter and put 21 Photoshop layers atop, mostly to re-distribute tones and to make it glow

It’s Friday morning now, I’m still behind, these are Wednesday’s pictures, I may catch up during today’s five hours on the train though.

On Wednesday I rose at 4:30am, hoping to see the HTTPS problem fixed, that prevented me from posting. No luck though, so I simply went to work much earlier, even before 6am, taking my time, shooting in the dark of pre-dawn morning on lonely streets.

I arrived at work before dawn and left long after dusk. In the meantime snow fell. You may have noticed that my attitude against winter is largely positive this year. It’s funny, but I like it. It could still be argued though, that snow in the city is one of the more unwelcome presents of nature, and as such it is treated. It takes about 20 minutes, and the white streets are filled with black sludge. With current temperature levels it’s to stay for some days though.

On a more technical note, Jen commented on the low noise of Tuesday’s picture, the one with the couple who needs to talk it over. I read the comment only minutes ago, but it comes as a nice coincidence that all images of today’s bicycles were shot even higher, not at ISO 2500, not at 3200, no, at ISO 6400.

The noise level at 100% size on screen is not as low as it looks here, but it is pretty good. The D300 is no D700, but the D700 is no D800 either, if you know what I mean

Cameras come and go. What the D300 can do, that is much more than the D2X ever could, and that one was considered pretty high-level pro, right? Today’s craze is the D700, but in a year, when a D800 will be with us, it will be considered obsolete. In fact, I could buy cameras all the time, one each year, every one will be better than its predecessor, at least in a certain way, but – really – even with the D300 I am in territory that had never been charted in film days. And still there were some pretty good photographs taken on film, don’t you agree

The Tuesday image was developed with DxO Optics Pro, that’s part of the low noise level. The combination of Adobe Camera RAW and Noise Ninja (or one of the other leading anti-noise plugins) can come close to DxO, but DxO is still better.

Today’s images are JPEGs straight out of the camera. That’s how ISO 6400 looks unprocessed. I can see no fault here, can you? Doing it in B&W does the trick. ISO 6400 in color is unacceptable on the D300, at least unprocessed. Using DxO it can well be usable though.

When I’m talking about noise, I’m talking about looking on huge images, like prints of at least A3, or looking at full-screen images on a 1920×1200 display. I don’t talk about the image sizes that you see here on the blog or that you get by clicking on any of my images. Noise is no problem of web-sized images today. No problem at all.

Deliberately shooting at ISO 6400 and with the camera set to B&W is something that I do once in a while. It is fun. Try it. Set your camera to the highest ISO, turn it to a B&W preset, shoot RAW + JPEG. The JPEGs will be B&W, the RAW will still have all the color information, but chances are, that you won’t miss color. You wouldn’t have missed it with a roll of B&W film loaded either. Now go out and shoot. Forget about ISO and technical image quality. You are at the lowest level now, it can’t get any worse. Shrug, see, compose and shoot some good pictures. Just don’t consider shooting test charts

As regards image titles, I’ll soon be through this album, I guess. The Song of the Day, “White Is In The Winter Night“, is one more time from Enya’s 2008 concept album “And Winter Came”. Hear it on YouTube.

A bicycle? I must be back to Vienna

Over the last two weeks I have spent quite some time with DxO Lab’s new version 5.3 of DxO Optics Pro. When I began processing today’s image, taken at f1.4, 1/60s and ISO 3200, I found that the demo had expired and I was back to Adobe Camera RAW and probably Noise Ninja. I reined in my first impulse to finally buy DxO and began working on the image with my usual tricks. I even uploaded the result to SmugMug, but the more I looked at it, the more I felt the need to go back and try it once again with DxO.

The result is, I did it, I am now owner of a license of the standard version of DxO Optics Pro, and I am glad that I did it. The result is clearly better than my first effort with Photoshop alone. I spare you another comparison on pixel level, fact is that I see a difference and that the difference is big enough to make me shell out the money.

DxO is not perfect. We have seen that Adobe Camera RAW plus Noise Ninja can outperform it under pathological conditions, and it also lacks in terms of workflow. Rather than acting as an import plugin, I’d like to see DxO being integrated into Photoshop as an alternative RAW converter, but all that is nit-picking. In practice DxO gives me the best RAW conversion that I’ve ever seen, at least for the Nikon D200 and D300. I probably won’t use it all of the time, but when I need it, it will be available.

The Song of the Day is “Try Some, Buy Some“, David Bowie’s George Harrison cover from the 2003 album “Reality”. Hear the album version and a live version on YouTube, and when you’re already there, why not compare it with the Harrison original?

Two days ago I partook in a thread about the D300’s usable ISO range in the Nikon camera forum on Photo.net. Josh Eudowe asked

Has anyone played around with the true ISO range of the D300 in an indoor setting? Just curious to know at what point you’ll start to see the image quality affected. I’m using, for the most part, f/2.8 lenses on my D300.

Like always it was interesting to read about what people consider acceptable image quality. Most people seemed to agree that ISO 1600 is very usable, many found ISO 3200 acceptable when shooting RAW and under special circumstances, and nobody but me found ISO 6400 usable at all.

Today’s image was shot in the morning, in the workshop of my father. I was there because I needed him and his big car for another transport.

My father has several walnut trees and thousands of walnuts laid out for drying. I saw the pattern, took some shots at f1.4 and found that in the dim light even that put me above the base ISO of 200. You know that I love shallow DOF, but in this case I didn’t want to display an abstract image of a slice of a nut, I wanted to show the multitude, in other words I needed more DOF.

Normally I have my tripod always in the back of the car, but since I had needed it last night, I had left it in the apartment. Thus, in order to get the shot at all, I had to increase ISO. I did it by switching to shooting bank B, that I have set up for a fixed ISO 6400 and JPEG output in slightly toned B&W. This is a JPEG right out of the camera. Not so bad, is it? In fact, I consider this extremely usable. Sigma 50/1.4, f8, 1/30s, ISO 6400.

The Song of the Day is “Nutty” from the 1957 album “Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane”. See a video on YouTube.

Yesterday I did not shoot anything but some test images, none of them did I want to make Image of the Day. This is from the archives, an image from the crypt below the Dome of Speyer, Germany. I shot it with the D200 in July 2007, using the Nikon 18-200 VR at f8, ISO 1600 and 1/3s, handheld. I’ve converted it with DxO and added some local contrast later in Photoshop.

I am still in Carinthia, it’s Sunday now and I have managed to install DxO 5.3 yesterday evening. We can carry on with the review.

Let me begin with a correction. In “741 – Just Another Day On Earth” I originally said that “what Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels“. This is wrong. Yesterday I found out that DxO can automatically eliminate what they term “dead pixels”, it’s only not on by default, and it is hidden down in the options for noise reduction. Sorry for the false alarm.

In a comment to that post Nick Jungels said that

“Looking at DxO Optics, the noise performance seems very, very similar to running Noise Ninja. At least in my one comparison the pictures were virtually identical (as far as noise goes).

Have you compared the DxO versus any of these other noise reduction options?

At that moment I had not, this is what I want to look into today, and here is the image that we will look at in some variations and detail. You see now why I used an old image for the Image of the Day?

I made three versions of this image: At ISO6400 and correctly lit, at ISO 3200 and one stop underexposed, and finally at ISO 3200 and underexposed by three stops. All three images were shot handheld with the D300 and the Sigma 50/1.4 at f4. High ISO noise reduction in the camera was set to “low” (from a standard of “normal”), exposure times were 1/60s and 1/250s. Fairly normal values for low light street photography. Let’s begin with a 100%crop:



You really have to click on the image for the 100% view to see the differences. Left is the result of Adobe Camera RAW 4.6, in the middle the same with Noise Ninja applied, and on the right is the output of DxO.

As to processing: First I have created the DxO image on standard settings, with the preset for high-ISO images applied. This produces stronger contrast, dark shadows, uses stronger noise reduction and also takes care of dead pixels. Then I have loaded the original RAW file into Adobe Camera RAW, without sharpening and with the exposure parameters set to automatic. Later in Photoshop I used adjustment layers to match this much lighter image to the look of the output of DxO. Basically I pulled all there was into Photoshop, and then toned it down, along with all noise. I think this is fair and as comparable as it gets.

There are quite some differences. Obviously the quality of Adobe Camera RAW without noise reduction is not really acceptable. There is a high level of noise, grain is coarse and we see much color noise as well.

Applying Noise Ninja made the image much better. This is not the detail that we expect from a 12 megapixel image, but for ISO 6400 it is the best that we can get without inventing detail.

DxO delivers a tad more sharpness, but that was to be expected as it did some sharpening and Adobe Camera RAW was set to do not. What’s obviously better, is color noise. Noise Ninja took care of the high-frequency color noise, but some low frequency noise, i.e. big color blotches, remained. The difference is not dramatic, but it is there.



Looking at the differences at 200% is more revealing. DxO produces a very fine grain on pixel level, Noise Ninja struggles with color noise. Overall I’d say that the result of DxO is more pleasing, looks less like digital artifacts, but you really have to care about pixel peeping to get a kick out of it.



Let’s do the same once again, this time with an image taken at ISO 3200, but underexposed by one stop. At 100% we see basically the same situation.

Please ignore the systematic tonal differences and the color difference in the dark tones. That’s an artifact of my method. I simply was not able to exactly match outputs. Let’s concentrate on noise instead.

Noise levels are slightly lower, the difference between Adobe Camera RAW + Noise Ninja and DxO is hardly visible.



At 200% it’s pretty much a tie, but from the looks I’d prefer DxO again. The fine grain actually looks nice, not like typical digital noise at all. On the other hand: both are clearly acceptable.

Then I turned to the ISO 3200 image underexposed by three stops, effectively pushing the image to ISO 25600, and this is the point where DxO breaks spectacularly. I did not even include a 200% comparison here, it is obvious. DxO smudges away detail like mad. I have tried for quite some time to find settings that would improve the result, but to no avail. In fact, this seems to be the best it can do under these conditions.



And Noise Ninja? Still riding the waves. The result that it produces is unusable as well, but compared to DxO it does not break, it degenerates slowly.

What’s the verdict now? If forensics is your job and you need to get the last information out of an image, even if you won’t be able to use it for any aesthetic purposes, then Noise Ninja is your tool. In any other case DxO seems as good or better, partly depending upon your aesthetic preferences.

In my eyes this result is not disappointing, not at all. After all, Noise Ninja is one of the best noise reduction plugins on the planet, one of three or four tools that constitute the state of the art. That DxO plays in that league and maybe slightly tops it, is quite remarkable, given that noise reduction is only one card in DxO’s game.

What about the price? Currently Noise Ninja and Neat Image cost around $70, Nik Software’s f="http://www.niksoftware.com/">Define 2.0 is sold by Amazon for around $80, while DxO Optics will cost you $170 or $300, depending on your camera. Thus you’ll clearly have to need something else out of DxO’s portfolio to justify the purchase.

We’ll look closer into these things in other posts. Stay tuned.

The Song the Day is “This Is A Test” from Wendy James’ 1993 collaboration with Elvis Costello Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears

Sorry, no sound samples, but looking for Wendy James on YouTube will give you some videos and an idea of what to expect.

I’m still shooting B&W images at ISO 6400, and this is one of them. Not that the B&W JPEG was bad, but I decided to try working on it in color, just to see where I get. Well, that’s one of the advantages of shooting RAW. Whatever you set your camera to, the RAW file is still raw sensor data, and of course all color information is still there.

The result: just as with yesterday’s images there is nothing wrong with this. At ISO 6400 a color image certainly needs some work to look this good, but it is no problem either. Verdict: ISO 6400 is usable as well, at least in good light. Night shots definitely deteriorate easier.

The Song of the Day is “When You Got A Good Friend” by Robert Johnson. Now, looking at the lyrics, I see that this probably does not describe exactly what the relationship between Erich and me is, but, oh well

I have the Robert Johnson original on disc 47 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive“. Hear it on YouTube.

Can you remember “593 – Controversy“? Well, this is the same place and the war goes on

This post had many inspirations. Faced by the new Canon 5D MkII, you can feel a certain tension in the Nikon crowd Everybody expected a 24 megapixel camera for Photokina, and what did we get? A 50/1.4. It may be fine, but I doubt it will be better than the new Sigma 50/1.4, though smaller and lighter.

Paul Lester recently wrote a clever post, “Avoiding occasional G.A.S cramps“, where he fights the lust for a D700 by using the D300 that he has. I have the slight suspicion that he is not yet really over it, at least he still reassures himself. Paul, let me tell you, that’s only the other side of G.A.S.

The other inspiration was Janine L. Thun from Hamburg. She has a beautiful daily photoblog, and in private conversation she asked me about the D300, considering buying one. I talked about my project to get a D700, and that way I arrived at my statement that, although high ISO is absolutely fine on the D300, ISO 6400 is not usable any more, and if at all, then only in B&W. She asked me for samples at 6400 and, well, here we are.

Reassurance? Click on any of the images. They all are JPEGs straight out of the camera. No Photoshop, no cropping, no nothing. I have set the camera to picture style “Monochrome” with a slight yellow tint applied, ISO 6400, and that was it.

It’s interesting what happens when you take ISO and noise out of the equation. Not that there is so much noise to begin with, at least at the sizes that I display here. It is a wholly new style of shooting, carefree.

There is something pleasant to the noise these new Nikon cameras produce. It began with the D200, and since then Nikon has perfected this film grain like look. I guess I will experiment with post-processing such images, because of course they may need some cropping, they may need a vignette applied, they may be material for any kind of my usual tricks, but what I have seen so far has made me feel very comfortable with my camera. Which may or may not preclude me from buying the D700

The Song of the Day is “Straight, No Chaser” from Thelonious Monk’s 1961 live album “Thelonious Monk in Italy”. See him perform eight years later on YouTube.